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Pleasures^ Objects, 

AND 

Advantages of Literature, 



" I can wonder at nothing more than how a man can be idle — 
but of all others, a scholar, — in so many improvements of reason, in 
such sweetness of knowledge, in such variety of studies, in such 
importunity of thoughts. To find wit in poetry; in philosophy, pro- 
foundness ; in history, wonder of events ; in oratory, sweet eloquence ; 
in divinity, supernatural light, and holy devotion — as so many rich 
metals in their proper mines, — whom would it not ravish with 
delight ? " — Bishop Hall : Epistle to Mr. Milivard. 



" Comforts, yea ! joys ineffable they find, 

Who seek the prouder pleasures of the mind : 
The soul, collected in those happy hours, 
Then makes her efforts, then enjoys her powers. 
No ! 'tis not worldly gain, although, by chance, 
The sons of learning may to wealth advance j 
Nor station high, though in some favouring hour 
The sons of learning may arrive at power j 
Nor is it glory, though the public voice 
Of honest praise will make the heart rejoice; 
But 'tis the mind's own feelings give the joy,— 
Pleasures she gathers in her own employ." 

Crabbe : The Borough, Letter xxiv. 



Pleasures, Objects, 



AND 



Advantages of Literature. 



BY THE 

REV. ROBERT ARIS V WILLMOTT. 
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NEW EDITION, 



London : 

GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, 

BROADWAY, LUDGATH HILL j 

NEW YORK : 129, GRAND STREET. 
t866. 



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LONDON : 

B. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 

BREAD STREET HILL. 



TO 

HIS MOTHER, 

THESE 

fkram 0f fitmtro, 

THE DIM REMEMBRANCES OF EARLY DAYS, 

%n mmxhzb 

BY 

THE AUTHOR. 



PREFACE 



THE FIRST EDITION, 



When three or four Tourists are met to- 
gether, who have formerly visited the same 
countries, it is amusing to observe their 
different impressions of the scenery. A 
mountain prospect delighted one, which 
another overlooked or disregarded ; while a 
fourth remembers an Alpine valley, unknown 
to his companions, and of unequalled gran- 
deur. The seasons and the hours most 
favourable to picturesque enjoyment also sug- 
gest many friendly djscussions ; a separate 
eulogist being found for sunrise, evening and 
moonlight. 



Vlll PREFACE TO THE 

The Author would not be surprised if the 
readers of the following Discourse should 
resemble the party of travellers — some com- 
plaining of fine scenes of fancy or learning 
that are left out ; and others of inferior views 
too elaborately presented. Variety must 
always be an accident of Opinion. The 
Writer, therefore, ofFers his sketches for what 
they may be worth. He believes them to 
have the merit of truth ; they were taken on 
the spot by one who really made the Tour. 
He hopes that his errors are neither serious 
nor many ; but the recollection of a remark 
upon a former publication induces him to 
say, that he is in the habit of writing the 
names of Painters and Authors as they appear 
in the classical Criticism and Biography of 
the eighteenth century ; — in Warton, Gilpin, 
Price, and Reynolds — without reference to 
the latest Hand-book, or Dictionary. To 



FIRST EDITION. IX 



any graver objections he can only reply by 
adopting the request of one of the oldest 
living Poets in England, that all the fault- 
finders will sit down immediately and excel 
him as much as they can ; which he sincerely 
desires may be as much as they please. 



NOTE 



THE FOURTH EDITION. 



The Author hopes that this Discourse has 
been improved by its renewed revision, and 
that the union of some of the Chapters has 
given more harmony to the whole. It has 
been considered expedient in the present 
edition to omit the marginal references, which 
would have prevented the compression of 
the text within the space allotted to it. 



St. Catherine's, 

November 24., 1854. 



CONTENTS. 



I. The Design and Limitations of this Discourse 
II. The long Life of Books 
III. Classical Studies : their Associations and Interest 
IV '. Mental Delights of 'Early Life . 
V. Taste j its Nature and Charms . 
VI. Taste, an Inheritance and a fashion 
VII. A Pure and Cultivated Taste seldom found 
VIII. Taste puts an Author in a -proper Light . 
IX. Books which are adapted to different Seasons 

X. Diligence the Handmaid of Taste 
XI. Criticism, its Curiosities and Researches 
XII. Criticism enforces Unity of Purpose 
XIII. Criticism the Source of many Delights . 



14 

17 
21 

24. 
29 
34- 
37 
40 

53 
56 



XIV. The Lessons of Criticism . . . 63 



Xll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XV. Poetry f its Shapes and Beauties . . .70 

XVI. Satire excluded from Poetry . . .84. 

XVII. The Drama, its Character and Entertainment . 85 

XVIII. The Delights and Consolations of Poetry . .91 

XIX. Fiction: the Romance and the Novel . .98 

XX. History: its Charms and Lessons . .110 

XXI. The Flowers of History — Biography . .122 

XXII. Literature of the Pulpit — its Entertainment . 14.1 

XXIII. Philosophy and its Delights . . .148 

XXIV. The Study of Languages . . .152 
XXV. Domestic Interiors of Learning and Taste . 155 

XXVI. Accountableness of Authors . . .162 

XXVII. The cultivated Mind and the uninformed . 167 



PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 
ADVANTAGES, 

OF 

LITERATURE. 



I. — The Design and Limitations of this 
Discourse. 

I do not propose to speak of literature in the widest 
sense, as including everything that requires inven- 
tion, judgment, or industry, but only in its deco- 
rative character. For, as out of three primitive 
colours the pencil creates nine, and lesser tints and 
shades innumerable, so from the elements of Poetry, 
Eloquence, and Philosophy, the variegated graces of 
the Divine, the Historian, and the Novelist, are 
composed. Bacon referred the three parts of learning 
to the corresponding qualities of the intellect ; His- 
tory to the memory, Poetry to the imagination, and 
Philosophy to the reason. My subject is the orna- 
mental in knowledge. But since the criterion of 
usefulness is found in the result, whatever is beauti- 
ful is also profitable. The pictures of Raffaelle 
teach virtue, and a sermon of Taylor is more binding 
than an Act of Parliament. This truth should be 
kept in view. Education is the apprenticeship of life. 

B 



2 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

A discourse upon literature is not unlike a land- 
scape seen from a hill. Only here and there may 
we hope to catch a glimpse of the great river of 
learning, " whose head, being far in the land, is, at 
first rising, little and easily viewed ; but still, as 
you go, it gapeth with a wider bank — not without 
pleasure and delightful winding — while it is on 
both sides set with trees and the beauty of various 
flowers ; but still, the further you follow it, the 
deeper and the broader it is, till, at last, it en- 
waves itself in the unfathomed ocean." We shall 
have clearer impressions of what we see, in propor- 
tion as our gaze is patient and our objects are few. 

Science is not embraced in the pleasures of litera- 
ture. Refined readers and noble authors are made 
without it. Ingenuity has endeavoured to show its 
healthful influence on the inventive faculty ; and a 
biographer of Tasso traces his lucid method to this 
harsher erudition, and the intricacy of Spenser to the 
neglect of it. Virgil and Milton are called as wit- 
nesses for the argument ; but he who sees the sym- 
metry of the Mneid in the geometry of the author, 
could account for the rural sweetness of the Elegy 
by the botany of Gray. Genius finds its own road, 
and carries its own lamp. The fourth proposition 
of Euclid troubled Alfieri for several years, yet he 
could construct a story, and reason in verse. Fleury 
might question the usefulness of logic, when he 
observed so many people arguing well who did not 
know it, and badly who did. 

Mathematical studies have one leading defect ; 
they engage the understanding without nourishing it, 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 3 

and often resemble an elaborate mechanism to con- 
vey water, without a spring, or a reservoir, to feed 
the pipes. In moral impression they are powerless. 
Burnet puts this objection with force : — " Learning 
chiefly in mathematical sciences can so swallow up 
and fix one's thought, as to possess it entirely for 
some time ; but when that amusement is over, 
nature will return, and be where it was, being rather 
diverted than overcome by such speculations." 
These, among other reasons, induced Bossuet to 
banish science from theological reading, and Fenelon 
to turn from what he called the diabolism of Euclid. 
We have the humiliating confession of a most fa- 
mous English astronomer, to serve as a note for the 
poetical lamentation, that — 

" Never yet did philosophic tube r 
That brings the planets home into the eye 
Of observation, and discovers — else 
Not visible — His family of worlds, 
Discover Him that rules them : such a veil 
Hangs over mortal eyes, blind from the birth, 
And dark in things divine." 

Cowper, pursuing with the eyes of devotion and 
love the summer sun, as it set over the village spire 
of Emberton, may have felt his heart swelling with 
a grander sense of the Creator's glory, than has often 
quickened the pulse of all the watchers of the stars, 
from the Chaldeans to Herschel. 



II. — The Long Life of Books. 

There are two aspects under which we might re- 
gard language, as a channel for communicating in- 



4- PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

struction and pleasure. One would be Speech. 
How astonishing it is to know that a man may stand 
in the crowd of learned or ignorant, thoughtful or 
reckless hearers — all the elements of reason and pas- 
sion tumultuously tossed together — and knock at 
the door of each heart in succession ! Think how 
this wonder has been wrought already. By De- 
mosthenes waving the stormy democracy into a 
calm, from a sunny hill-side ; by Plato enchaining 
the souls of his disciples, under the boughs of a dim 
plane-tree ; by Cicero in the stern silence of the 
Forum ; by our own Chatham in the chapel of St. 
Stephen. They knocked and entered ; wandered 
through the bosoms of their hearers ; threaded the 
dark labyrinths of feeling ; aroused the fiercest pas- 
sions in their lone concealment. They did more. 
In every heart they erected a throne, and gave laws. 
The Athenian populace started up with one accord 
and one cry to march upon Philip ; the Senate 
throbbed with indignation at Catiline ; and the 
British Parliament was dissolved for a few hours, 
that it might recover from the wand of the enchanter. 

But it is in the second manifestation of language 
that the most marvellous faculty resides : the written 
outlives and out-dazzles the spoken word. The 
life of rhetoric perishes with the rhetorician ; it 
darkens with his eye, stiffens with his hand, freezes 
with his tongue. The bows of eloquence are buried 
with the archers. Where is the splendid declama- 
tion of Bolingbroke ? It has vanished, like his own 
image, from the grass-plots of Twickenham. 

That intellect, to which the printing-press gives 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 5 

a body, an unquenchable spirit inhabits. Literature 
is the immortality of speech. It embalms for all 
ages the departed kings of learning, and watches 
over their repose in the eternal pyramids of Fame. 
The sumptuous cities which have lighted the world 
since the beginning of time, are now beheld only in 
the pictures of the historian or the poet. Homer 
rebuilds Troy, and Thucydides renews the war of 
Peloponnesus. The dart that pierced the Persian 
breast-plate moulders in the dust of Marathon ; but 
the arrow of Pindar quivers, at this hour, with the 
life of his bow; like the discus of Hippomedon, 

" Jamque procul meminit dextrae, servatque tenorem." 

We look with grateful eyes upon this preservative 
power of. literature. When the Gothic night 
descended over Europe, Virgil and Livy were nearly 
forgotten and unknown ; but far away, in lone cor- 
ners of the earth amid silence and shadow, the 
ritual of Genius continued to be solemnized : 
without, were barbarism, storm, and darkness ; 
within, light, fragrance, and music. So the sacred 
fire of Learning burnt upon its scattered shrines, 
until torch after torch carried the flame over the 
world. 

One of the Spanish romancers shows Cydippe 
contemplating herself in a glass, and the power of 
Venus making the reflection permanent. The fable 
has a new and a pleasanter reading in the history of 
Literature. A book becomes a mirror, with the 
author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an 
imperfect image — the broken glimmer of a counte- 
nance. But the features of Genius remain unruffled. 



6 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual 
Venus — whose children are the Tassos, the 
Spensers, the Bacons — breathes the magic of her 
love, and fixes the face for ever. 

These glasses of fancy, eloquence, or wisdom, 
possess a stranger power. Illuminated by the sun 
of fame, they throw rays over watchful and reverent 
admirers. The beholder carries away some of the 
gilding lustre. And thus it happens that the light of 
Genius never sets, but sheds itself upon other faces, 
in different hues of splendour. Homer glows in the 
softened beauty of Virgil, and Spenser revives in the 
decorated learning of Gray. 

Art has been less happy in its self-protection. 
Look at Correggio's " Notte," where the light 
breaks from the Heavenly Child. Towards the 
close of the last century, a director of the Dresden 
Gallery removed the toning^ and deprived the picture 
of one of its fairest charms. Fifty years ago, ob- 
servers complained that the colour was gone from 
the u Cornaro Family " of Titian. The Helen of 
Homer and the Faery Queen of Spenser are safe 
from such a catastrophe. Lalage has not lost a 
dimple. The tears still glisten in the eyes of 
Erminia. The coarsest rubbings of critical pens, 
or the harsher resolvents of digamma and allegory, 
have left the features, and even the bloom of ex- 
pression, unimpaired. 

The poem, or the history, is also protected from 
the restorer. Lord Orford told Gilpin that the 
great Vandyck at Wilton had been retouched by an 
inferior pencil, to which some of its discord oi 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 7 

colours may be attributed. Dryden constructed a 
'graceful allegory of Time, leaning over the work of 
a great master, with that ready pencil and ripening 
hand which 

" Mellow the colours and imbrown the tint." 

But Pope wrote the true story of Art when he said, 
with the exquisite taste and feeling with which he. 
always spoke of painters, as Milton of music, and 
Thomson of scenery, — 

" So when the faithful pencil has designed 
Some bright idea of the master's mind, 
When a new world leaps out at his command, 
And ready nature waits upon his hand ; 
When the ripe colours soften and unite, 
And sweetly melt into just shade and light j 
When mellowing years their full perfection give, 
And each bold figure just begins to live, 
The treacherous colours the fair art betray, 
And all the bright creation fades away." 

It is not pretended that the genius of the pen is 
safe from all casualties that beset his brother of the 
pencil. I have not forgotten Hume's letter to 
Robertson about the gentleman who, sending for a 
pound of raisins, received them wrapped up in the 
Doctor's highly-drawn character of Queen Eliza- 
beth. Literature has its complaint as well as its 
paean. The splendid libraries of Rome are con- 
sumed by fire, and the unknown treasures of Greece 
perish in the sack of Constantinople. Still the poet 
and the historian maintain their 'Supremacy over the 
artist and the sculptor. A mob shatters into dust 
that statue of Minerva whose limbs seemed to 
breathe under the flowing robe, and her lips to 
move ; but the fierceness of the Goth, the ignorance 
of the Crusader, and the frenzy of the polemic, 



8 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

have not destroyed or mutilated Penelope and 

Electra. Apelles dies ; iEschylus lives. And if 

we have lost Phidias, Homer gives us a Jupiter in 
gold. 



Ill, — Classical Studies : their Associations 

AND INTEREST. 
" Books are not seldom talismans and spells." 

The line is Cowper's. This charm dwells especially 
in Greek and Latin writers. Much of it is owing 
to the season when they are put into our hands. 
Life is a garden of romance, and every day 

" An Idyll with Boccaccio's spirit warm." 

Our eyes lend their brightness to the things they 
look upon. The book is endeared by the friends 
and the pleasures it recalls. This feeling of remem- 
brance often dims the eye of riper manhood, as it 
recognises the worn-out school Horace, with its 
familiar marks. Silent lips and cold hands seem 
again to welcome and clasp us : — 

" Up springs at every step, to claim a tear, 
Some little friendship formed and cherished herej 
And not the lightest leaf but trembling teems 
With golden visions and romantic dreams." 

Association is the delight of the heart, not less 
than of poetry. Alison observes that an autumn 
sunset, with its crimson clouds, glimmering trunks 
of trees, and wavering tints upon the grass, seems 
scarcely capable of embellishment. But if in this 
calm and beautiful glow the chime of a distant bell 
steal over the fields, the bosom heaves with the 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 0, 

sensation that Dante so tenderly describes. The 
pensive joy of the student is awakened in the same 
manner. The clock of time, measuring the hours 
of life's departing day, strikes mournfully over the 
landscape of years. He remembers whom and 
what he has lost. 

Even without this sympathy of association, classic 
story and fancy have a livelier interest than the 
modern j they are shaded by the twilight into which 
they are withdrawn. Delille indicated the defect of 
the Henriade by saying that it was too near to the 
eye and the age. It has been suggested that Milton 
might have thrown his angelic warfare into remoter 
perspective. The fame of a battle-field grows with 
its years ; Napoleon storming the Bridge of Lodi, 
and Wellington surveying the towers of Salamanca, 
affect us with fainter emotions than Brutus reading 
in his tent at Philippi, or Richard bearing down with 
the English chivalry upon the white armies ot 
Saladin. Nelson leading the line of war-ships against 
Copenhagen is less picturesque than Drake crowding 
his canvas after the galleons of Spain. One fleet lies 
under our eye ; the other is enveloped in mist, and, 

" Far off at sea descried, 
Hangs in the clouds." 

As we grow older, the poet and the historian of 
our boyhood and youth become dearer. The thyme 
of Theocritus is wafted over the memory with a 
refreshing perfume. By a sort of natural magic, we 
raise the ghost of each intellectual Pleasure, and 
make it appear without any dependence upon climate 
or time. The mind's theatre is lighted for the 



10 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Pageant of old Learning to march through it, with 
all its pomp and music. The nightingale of Colonos 
enjoys a perpetual May in Sophocles. Pindar be- 
guiles the loneliness of Cowley ; while Horace lulls 
asleep the cares of Sanderson, and the domestic 
miseries of Hooker. 

Unlike Science, Literature is not inductive. Its 
secrets are never discovered by scholars, tracking 
obscure hints which nature, or their ancestors, had 
dropped. A basket, left on the ground and over- 
grown by acanthus, suggests the Corinthian capital ; 
the contemplation of the sun's rays along a wall pro- 
duces the achromatic telescope ; the movements of 
a frog reveal the wonders of galvanism ; and an idle 
boy shows the way to perfect the steam-engine. 
Nothing of this kind has happened in literature. 
The Egyptian lake, in which some eyes see the 
source of the old Greek streams, ever melts into 
bluer distance, like the water-mist of the desert. 
The Epic begins with the Iliad. The curtain 
rises from the Agamemnon of iEschylus ; Pitt 
borrows of Demosthenes ; Robertson does not 
heighten the colours of Livy ; nor Montesquieu 
outgaze the sagacity of Tacitus. 

The Homeric poems are the Pleasures of Litera- 
ture in an abridgment. They are the sap circulat- 
ing through every leaf of the tree of knowledge, and 
shedding blossoms on the furthest bough. Homer, 
than dramatists more dramatic, was the founder of 
the theatre, and peopled the stage. The Greek 
tragedy is the epic recast ; the narrative being broken 
into dialogue, and the poet disappearing in the Chorus. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. II 

All the gentler shapes of fancy, seen in the lyrical 
poetry of Greece, were only flowers growing round 
his massive trunk, and sheltered by the majesty of 
his shade. 

Nor in verse alone was his presence perceived 
and felt. See, in the wide-flowing stream of Plato's 
philosophy, the rich fruits of the Poet's imagination, 
pouring down into the transparent depths the re- 
flected shadows of their beauty. The ear catches 
the epic tune in the simpler melodies of Herodotus. 
It is easy to tell why Arnold's eyes filled with tears 
at the story of Cleobis and Biton, rewarded for their 
filial piety by falling asleep in the temple, and dying 
together ; and why he sat by the sick-bed of his 
dying sister, translating whole books into the quainter 
English of old chronicles. 

The same under-current of song sometimes 
freshens the dry track of Aristotle's severe inquiries, 
and betrays its hidden course by unexpected flushes 
of verdure and bloom over the hard surface. Him- 
self the subject of all criticism, he let down from his 
heaven of starry thoughts the scales, in which his 
own genius was to be weighed. And whosoever, 
in this calm weather of refinement and civilization, 
sets out upon a voyage of poetical discovery, or 
pleasure, is 

" Led by the light or the Masonian star." 

If we turn to Romance, we see its green world 
of beauty, pathos, and wisdom, rising from the fruit- 
ful waves of the Homeric inundation. Achilles, 
Hector, and Ulysses present outlines of every hero 
who has won admiration, or drawn tears. The two 



12 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

former embody, in outward grace and vigour, the 
dreams, the enterprise, and the affections, of bright 
and passionate manhood ; the latter is a type of the 
tried spirit, educated and ennobled by difficulties 
endured and overcome. 

Let Homer signify u a faithful witness j" and who, 
in portraying the glory, or the shame, of the manly 
or the womanly heart, is more eloquent or true ? 
The Odyssey is a circulating library in one volume. 
All lights and shades of fiction chase each other 
along the page. The border-story, the exploits of 
chivalry, the fairy-legend, the solemn allegory, the 
picture of manners, the laughter-moving sketch — 
each drops, in turn, from the mysterious lips of the 
Asiatic Shakspere. A thousand costly morals are 
treasured in Telemachus conducted by Mentor* 
What countless Ladies of Shalott have descended 
from Calypso, who, in her lonely island of the purple 
sea, 

"' Busied with the loom, and plying fast 
Her golden shuttle, with melodious voice 
Sat chaunting there." 

The Homeric characters live and walk among us. 
Thersites grumbles and sneers ; Ulysses constantly 
finds his way home, as the fortunate adventurer; 
and Penelope has been reappearing, for the last two 
centuries, in the deserted, or the tempted wife. 

The key of the supernatural, which, in later times, 
unlocked the haunted chambers of Udolpho, was cer- 
tainly held by him who caused Mount Ida, the Greek 
fleet, and the Trojan city, to trenr*ble all over as the 
Gods came down into battle. And not very ob- 
scurely may be seen rising over 'he epic mist, the 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 13 

battlements of that Castle, which, as we learn from 
Gray, made Cambridge men " in general afraid to 
go to bed o'nights." The ghost of Alphonso, grow- 
ing every moment more gigantic in the moonlight, 
is not conceived with a fearfuller sweep of Gothic 
magnificence, than the enormous stride of Achilles 
in the world of spirits, when he heard that the son 
was worthy of the father. The Poet's Hades had 
mightier and stranger inhabitants than Otranto. Even 
the school of horrors may date its beginning from 
the cave of Polyphemus, when the spear of olive- 
wood hissed in the flaming socket of his lost eye. 
Reckon up the enchantments of Circe ; the escape 
from the Sirens ; affection in humble life, as exhi- 
bited by Eiimaeus ; the retributive phrenzy sent upon 
the suitors of Penelope, and the bending of the won- 
derful bow. Call to mind those delicious scenes 
from nature, which make the reading of his verses 
to be like opening a window into a garden, when 
the south wind fans the roses up the wall. Think 
over his noble sentiments, and his many lessons of 
wisdom, generosity, and patience ; compare his 
poetical fire — swallowing everything base in its 
mighty rush — with the mild lustre of Virgil, the 
artificial glow of Milton, or the accidental flames of 
Shakspere ; and confess that Homer is not only the 
Poet, but the Historian, the Philosopher, the Painter, 
the Critic, and the Romancer of the world. 



14 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

IV. — Mental Delights of Early Life. 

There is one pleasure of literature that fades almost 
as quickly as it blooms. I mean the intensity of 
belief in what we read ; when turning our mind 
adrift upon a story, we glide, according to its will, 
beside overhanging gardens, or twilight depths of 
trees, until, floated beyond the colours and sounds of 
common scenes and life, we find ourselves under 

" Magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery-land forlorn." 

Mr. Stewart thought that his relish for tales of 
wonder was as lively in the decline of his life as it 
had been in the beginning, and that he did not value 
the amusement which they afforded him the less, 
because his reason taught him to regard them as 
vehicles of entertainment, not as articles of faith. 
His explanation refutes itself. The sense of reality 
gives the charm. Introduce judgment, and the spell 
is broken. The undoubting mind, which Collins 
bestowed upon Tasso, is the characteristic only of 
the great poet, or the youngest reader. Romance is 
the truth of imagination and boyhood. Homer's 
horses clear the world with a bound. The child's 
eye needs no horizon to its prospect. An Oriental 
tale is not too vast. Pearls dropping from trees are 
only falling leaves in autumn. The palace that 
grew up in a night merely awakens a wish to live in 
it. The impossibilities of fifty years are the com- 
monplaces of five. 

What philosopher of the school-room, with the 
mental dowry of four summers, ever questions the 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 15 

power of the wand that opened the dark eyes of the 
beautiful Princess ; or subtracts a single inch from 
the stride of seven leagues ? The Giant-killer with 
the familiar name has the boy's whole heart. And 
if Johnson in anger put down a little girl from his 
knee, who had never read Pilgrim's Progress^ what 
a frown would he have cast upon her whose tears of 
joy do not trickle over the Glass Slipper ! Burke 
expresses the sentiments of many hearts : — " I de- 
spair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure 
from the most exalted performances of genius, which 
I felt at that age from pieces which my present 
judgment regards as trifling and contemptible." 

The first and the last days of life have, indeed, 
one sentiment in common. A book interests in pro- 
portion as it surprises us. When a friend entered the 
library of Gray, he found him absorbed in the news- 
paper. It contained the opening letter of Junius. 
That venomous glitter of eye had the fascination of 
a discovery. Boccaccio, climbing by a ladder to the 
grass-grown loft of a monastery, to disinter a classic 
fragment from the dusty parchments, and Petrarch 
feasting his eyes on a ^uintilian — just brought into 
daylight — exhibit the sentiment in a more agreeable 
shape. The remark applies with" equal truth to 
scenery, or any remains of antiquity : whether Raf- 
faelle lingers over the outline of a Greek head upon 
a medal, or Poussin recognizes some faintly-defined 
feature of a leaf, by which he may give its portrait 
with all the accuracy of a botanist. In each case the 
key to the delight is to be found in the surprise ; so 
far the boy and the sage read a book by the same 



l6 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

light. But, however lively may be the enjoyment 
of* taste unexpectedly gratified, it is weak in com- 
parison with that vivid sense and glow of happiness 
and wonder, which quicken the pulse and brighten 
the eye of intelligent childhood. It finds its feeling 
unconsciously expressed by the poet, who spoke of 
his own rapture and amazement on first looking into 
Chapman's Homer : — 

" Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, 

When a new planet swims into his ken ; 

Or like stout Cortes when, with eagle eyes, 

He stared at the Pacific — and all the men 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise — 

Silent upon a peak hi Darien." 

The reader is surrounded by a new creation. The 
poem and the tale in youth are like Adam's early 
walk in the Garden. In the beautiful words of 
Burke, c< The senses are unworn and tender, and 
the whole frame is awake in every part." The dew 
lies upon the grass. No smoke of busy life has 
darkened or stained the morning of our day. The 
pure light shines about us. If any little mist happen 
to rise, the sunbeam of hope catches and paints 
it. The cloudy weather melts in beauty, and the 
brightest smiles of the heart are born of its tears. 

A first book has some of the sweetness of a first 
love. The music of the soul passes into it. The 
unspotted eye illuminates it. Defects are unob- 
served ; sometimes they grow even pleasing from 
their connection with an object that is dear, like the 
oblique eye in the girl to whom the philosopher was 
attached. Later surprises will amuse, and deeper 
sympathies may cheer us, but the charm loses its 
freshness, and the tenderness some of the balm. 



ADVANTAGES, CF LITERATURE. If 

Perhaps the loving admiration of Virgil, in what 
are called the dark times of literature, may be ex- 
plained on this principle. The dawn of civilization 
is the childhood of a people. The JEneid was the 
fairy tale, and Virgil was the enchanter of the middle 
ages. The revival of learning gave to it all the 
sparkle of surprise. A costly book was the home of 
a Magician. It cast rays from every page, as from 
a window. A scholar, winding out of mediaeval 
ignorance, and coming suddenly upon one of these 
illuminated Palaces of Fancy, was not unlike a way- 
farer, whose dismal road of snow and tempest 
brought him in the evening, fuli of joy and reve- 
rence, to the gate of a lighted abbey. 



V. — Taste, its Nature, and Charms. 

Literature has two eyes — Taste and Criticism. 
Without these the book is cold and dark as the 
greenest landscape to a man who is blind. The best 
definition of Taste was given by the earliest editor 
of Spenser who proved himself to possess any, when 
he called it a kind of extempore judgment. Burke's 
view was not dissimilar. He explained it to be an 
instinct which immediately awakes the emotion of 
pleasure or dislike. Akenside is clear, as he is poe- 
tical, in the question :— 

" "What, then, is Taste but those internal powers 
Active, and strong, and feelingly alive 
To each fine impulse? a discerning sense 
Of decent and sublime, with quick disgust 
From things deformed, or disarranged, or gross, 
In species ? This nor gems, nor stores of gold, 

C 



IS PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Nor purple state, nor culture, can bestow, 
But God alone, when first His sacred Hand 
Imprints the secret bias of the soul." 

We may consider Taste, therefore, to be a set- 
tled habit of discerning faults and excellences in a 
moment — the mind's independent expression of ap- 
proval or aversion. It is that faculty by which we 
discover and enjoy the beautiful, the picturesque, 
and the sublime, in literature, art, and nature ; which 
recognizes a noble thought as a virtuous mind wel- 
comes a pure sentiment, by an involuntary glow of 
.satisfaction. But while the principle of perception 
is inherent in the soul, it requires a certain amount 
of knowledge to draw out and direct it. The utter- 
most ignorance has no curiosity. Captain Cook 
met with some savages who entirely disregarded his 
ship — the first they had ever seen — as it sailed by 
them. 

Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and 
is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is 
refined by religion. In its most advanced state it 
takes the title of Judgment. Hume quotes Fonte- 
nelle's ingenious distinction between the common 
watch that tells the hours, and the delicately-con- 
structed one that marks the seconds and smallest 
differences of time. 

A taste, enriched by observation and learning, 
sensitive even to the tremble of the balance by which 
the scale is suspended, is probably one of the most 
desirable endowments of the mind. It enjoys some 
of the humbler qualities of invention. It brings a 
dim meaning into light, and not only beholds the 
image, or the argument, but gazes beyond them into 



ADVANTAGE?, OF LITERATURE. 10, 

the rudiments of their creation. It identifies itself 
with the author ; sees what he saw, and feels what 
he felt. It enters readily into the reply of Paul 
Veronese to a person who asked him why some 
figures appeared in shade — " A cloud is passing over 
the sky, and darkens t^e picture." Another ex- 
ample will show this power of Taste still more 
clearly. In Raffaelle's " Burning of Borgho Vec- 
chio," the dresses of the people who carry water 
toss in the wind ; an ordinary observer perceives 
nothing in the circumstance, but a finer sight learns 
from it that the conflagration is rising with the gale, 
and that the flames will conquer. 

These forward, inward, and backward looks are 
the motion and life of Taste. When that eye of the 
intellect is closed, or injured, the majesty of Genius 
is obscured, or broken. Men of brightest thoughts, 
walking abroad in their books, are unknown by the 
multitude. The Muse who inspired them conceals, 
with a thick mist, their shape and features from the 
rude stare of the bystanders — as the Olympian Lady 
enveloped the Trojans in the palace of Dido — to 
dawn upon the friendly and purified eyes of reflective 
Taste, in the fresh bloom of beauty ,'and in the per- 
fect gracefulness of form. 

Moliere might read a comedy to his old servant, 
and alter it according to the effect which it produced, 
but her opinion could be useful only in sketches of 
manners, or descriptions of vulgar feelings. Suppose 
that the grandest pictures of Dante or iEschylus 
had been exhibited, and her decision on their com- 
parative merits desired ; the poet would have been 



20 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

a Judge leaving his court to consult the Crier on a 
question of law. There is a familiar story of a 
Scottish nobleman finding one of his shepherds in a 
field poring over Paradise Lost, and asking him what 
book he was reading — " Please your lordship," was 
the answer, " this is a very odd sort of an author ; 
he would fain rhyme, but cannot get at it." The 
shepherd might have understood Allan Ramsay ; 
Milton was out of his reach. 

But not even to its own kindred has Genius been 
always revealed. Horace censured Plautus. The 
Library of Petrarch wanted the Divine Comedy, until 
Boccaccio sent it decorated with gold. Daniel, a 
contemporary of Spenser, and a versifier of much p 
elegance, ridiculed the antique English of the Faery , 
£hteen Walpole sneered at Thomson, and Gray 
could satisfy himself with admitting the Castle of In- 
dolence to contain " some good stanzas." Hurd re- 
gretted that Milton had not written of angels in 
rhyme ; Shenstone thought that Spenser might be 
enjoyed in a humorous light. Blackmore was the 
Homer of Locke. The critics of the Hotel de 
Rambouillet, with Voiture at their head, predicted 
the failure of Corneille ; and Patru, quite a leader of 
fashion in books, dissuaded Fontaine from writing p 
fables. 

Jealousy may often explain blindness. When Le \ 
Brun heard of the death of Le Sueur, he said that he 
felt as if a thorn had just been taken out of his foot.- 
Bellino warns Titian that he will never succeed in 
painting; and Titian, crowned with fame, scowls- 
upon the dawning honours of Tintoretto. Pordenone,; 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 21 

at Venice, kept a shield and dagger by his side. Not 
seldom the theologian, the poet, and the man of let- 
ters, display the same temper. Bossuet condemns 
the Telemachus of Fenelon ; Corneille doubts the 
dramatic powers of Racine ; and Voltaire smiles con- 
descendingly at the humour of Le Sage. 



VI. — Taste, an Inheritance and a Fashion. 

Taste has frequently an imaginary existence, un- 
connected with the intellect. It is merely hereditary 
or acquired, and descends from father to son with 
his prejudices and estate. The manor-house, the 
hounds, and Somerville, go together. Certain authors 
are adopted into families. Bunyan has the sacred- 
ness of a legacy; the songs of Watts are bound up 
with earliest days at mothers' knees ; and Gray's 
Elegy incloses a domestic interior of warmth and 
affection in every stanza. There are hymns which 
have been intoned through the noses of three genera- 
tions, and will probably delight the coming age with 
all the music and endearment of theL* ancestral twang. 
In such cases the heart, not the understanding, is the 
source of interest, and admiration is only a pleasure 
of memory. 

Taste is often one of the aspects of Fashion. 
Folly borrows its mask, and walks out with Wisdom 
arm-in-arm. Like virtues of greater dignity, it is 
assumed. The furniture and decorations of a room 
are arranged to indicate the serious and graceful sen- 



22 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

timents of the occupant. Bishop Sanderson looks 
gravely on Petrarch through his gold frame. Boc- 
caccio sparkles over a grim treatise of Calvin, and a 
ruffle is smoothed in Aquinas. 

Addison sketched a student of this order, in whose 
library he found Locke On the Understanding with a 
paper of patches among the leaves, and all the classic 
authors — in wood, with bright backs. To such 
readers, a new book of which people talk is like a 
new costume which a person of celebrity has intro- 
duced. It is the rage. Not to be acquainted with 
it is to be ill dressed. The pleasure is not of Lite- 
rature, but of vanity. The pretended taste is a polite 
fraud of society. 

When a fashion of this kind happens to spread, it 
takes the character of a disease, raging and vanishing 
with the virulence and speed of an epidemic. Marino 
in Italy, Gongora in Spain, and Cowley in England, 
are varieties of the same type. Butler, sitting with 
his chaplain, as his habit was, in a deep reverie, sud- 
denly started up, with the exclamation, " Surely 
whole bodies of men sometimes lose their wits as 
instantaneously as an individual does ! " The 
Bishop's conjecture might very well illustrate the 
breaking out of a popular fever in things concerning 
Taste. 

This, like other attacks of delirium, is unmanage- 
able while it lasts. Its will is absolute. Reynolds 
assured Northcote, that in the beginning of his own 
career the fame of Kneller was so universal, that a 
connoisseur presuming to suggest a competitor in 
Vandyck, would have been laughed to scorn 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 23 

Spence's criticism on the Odyssey was pronounced 
by persons of reputation to be superior to Addison's 
papers on Milton. It is pleasant to know that 
sooner or later the fever departs, and Taste recovers 
the tone of health. Sixty years ago we meet with 
Kasselas, Telemachus, Cyrus^ and Marcus Flaminius^ 
moving as equals in fortune and rank. The authors 
had passed their examination for honours, and were 
sent before the world in brackets. Time has changed 
their places in the calender. Johnson and Fenelon 
are household words, but who speaks of Sir Charles 
Ramsay, or Cornelia Knight ? 

Two other peculiarities may be noticed in the 
natural history of Taste. The first is the strong 
propensity in most people to make themselves and 
their views the measure of excellence. The sceni- 
cal De Stael, always on the watch for a stage effect, 
complained that Spenser was the most tedious writer 
in the world. Nor is the error confined to indi- 
viduals. It is national. A country grows its taste 
like its fruit. Germany and romance inspire 
Schlegel ; England and good sense rule Mr. Hallam. 
Read and contrast those two characters of 7 a famous 
tragedy. " Why," asks Schlegel, " does the Romeo 
of Shakspeare stand so far above all the other dramas 
of that poet, except that in the first delightful gush 
of youthful passion he deemed that work a fitting 
shrine for the outpouring of his emotion, with which 
the entire poem thus became filled and interpene- 
trated ?" " It may be said," observes Mr. Hallam, 
" that few^ if any of his plays are more open to rea- 
sonable censure ; and we are almost equally struck 



24 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

by its excellences and its defects. The love of 
Romeo is that of the most bombastic commonplace 
of gallantry, and the young lady differs only in being 
one degree more mad." Were two voices ever 
heard more contrary or positive? 

The second peculiarity resides in what may be 
characterized as the Taste of the Market. In an 
age of high civilization, a publisher is a manufac- 
turer. He supplies the demand, but rarely creates 
it Helvetius has an amusing story of a person ap- 
pearing before a tribunal and describing himself as a 
maker of books. The judge pleaded ignorance of 
his productions. " I quite believe you," answered 
the author, with tranquillity ; " I write nothing for 
Paris. When my book is printed, I send the edition 
to America. I only compose for the Colonies." 
He who addresses his own century, and flatters its 
caprices, will probably be as unknown in the next, 
as the scribbler for remote countries was in Paris. 



VII. — A Pure and Cultivated Taste 

SELDOM FOUND. 

Shenstone said that if the world were divided into 
one hundred parts, persons of original taste, edu- 
cated by art, would only form a twentieth portion of 
the whole. Popular opinion is the old fable of the 
lion's great supper. The delicacies of the forest 
were spread before the guests ; but the swine asked, 
" Have you no grains ? " The most unpleasing 
shape of bad Taste is a flippant confidence, with a 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 2$ 

strong show of appreciation. An entertaining French 
writer relates an experiment he made upon the mu- 
sical feelings of animals. The spectator altogether 
unmoved was the one which outwardly had the 
most ear. He munched his thistles, and took no 
notice at all. 

Dryden was certain, if Virgil and Martial had 
stood for a county, that the epigrammatist would 
have carried the election ; but he consoled himself 
by reflecting that in matters of Taste the applause of 
the mob is altogether worthless, and that, not having 
lands of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, they 
are not privileged to poll. 

Johnson enumerated three classes of literary 
judges : — (i.) Those who give their opinion from 
impulse and feeling ; (2 ) Those who measure a line 
or a paragraph by rules alone; (3,) And those who, 
being familiar with the laws of composition, and 
skilful in applying them, are independent of all. He 
advised an author to try and satisfy the third class, 
to esteem the first, but to despise and reject the 
second. His judgment is upheld by distinguished 
authorities. " Whoever writes or acts bf system," 
is a remark of Payne Knight, " may stand a chance 
of being uniformly and invariably wrong." That 
which pleases a refined and a reflective reader must 
be good, although the artillery of criticism be played 
upon it. The falling tear blots out Aristotle. 

The most philosophical critic of the eighteenth 
century perceived that graceful and imaginative com- 
position should be estimated chiefly by its impression 
upon the mind. Shaftesbury recommended an au- 



26 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

thor to assemble the best forces of his wit, in order 
to make an assault on the territories of the heart. 
Reynolds spoke of taste as depending on those finer 
emotions which make the organization of the soul. 
Nor is a remark of Alison undeserving of remem- 
brance, that the exercise of criticism always destroys 
for a time our sensibility to beauty, by leading us to 
regard the work in relation to certain laws of con- 
struction. The eye turns from the charms of 
Nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of Art. 

The unconscious testimony of Gray may be 
added. When he sent his Ode on the Progress of 
Poetry to Dr. Warton, he requested him not to 
show it to mere scholars, who could scan the mea- 
sures of Pindar, and say the Scholia by heart. 

Literature is a garden, books are particular views 
of it, and readers are visitors. Much of their plea- 
sure depends on the guides. It is very important to 
obtain the assistance of those only who are familiar 
with the beauties they show, and able, from feeling 
and practice, to appreciate lights, and shades, and 
colours. Of this small band Gilpin is a remarkable 
instance. How happily he clears a passage in the 
Iliad which learning had left in obscurity. 

Homer distinguishes Jupiter by a peculiarity of 
forehead ; Gilpin shows us that the poet intended 
to portray the projecting brow, which casts a broad 
shadow over the eye. His interpretation is ex- 
tremely picturesque, and may be compared with 
Spenser's description of the Dragon : — 

''But far within, as in a hollow glade, 
Those glowing lamps were set, that made a dreadful shade." 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1J 

Here is another example. Virgil paints a ship in 
full sail, and losing sight of the line of coast it is 
leaving : — 

'* Protinus aerias Phaeacum abscondimus arces." 

In the eyes of scholastic readers, u aerial" is only 
a synonyme for " tall." But a receding object does 
not suggest merely elevation. Taste again holds up 
its lamp. Gilpin conjectures that Virgil, who above 
all poets enjoyed the artistic eye, intending to indi- 
cate colour rather than shape, represented the towers 
bathed in that soft blue of distance, which gives the 
faint azure tinge to mountain scenery. 

This delicacy of discrimination communicates a 
charm to the Essays of Uvedale Price, which will 
do more to form a true feeling for the beautiful than 
any single book in the English language. Twining 
is a younger member of the same family. One 
specimen will be interesting. Speaking of sounds, 
and the opportunities which they afford of descrip- 
tive imitation, he refers to Milton's "curfew," 

" Over some wide-watered shore, 
Swinging slow with sullen roar ;" 

and teaches us not to consider " swinging," as ex- 
pressing only the motion of the bell, but to feel that 
its swing is actually heard in its tone, " which is 
different from what it would be if the same bell were 
struck with the same force, but at rest." 

The elegance of Gilpin, the graceful knowledge 
of Price, the sensibility of Twining, and the poeti- 
cal refinement of the Wartons, are exceptions among 
commentators. A correction, or a note, is too often 
out of harmony with the passage explained or 



28 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

amended. A glowing verse of Shakspere becomes 
dreary in a moment. The sun goes in, when Maratti 
retouches the picture of Titian. 

It may be regretted, that a large capacity and vi- 
gorous imagination are so seldom accompanied by 
Taste. The tender blossom of fancy faded in the 
hard pressure of Warburton. He has become his 
own accuser in the annotation he wrote upon these 
two lines of Shapspeare : — 

"And cuckow-buds of yellow hue 
Do paint the meadows with delight j" 

a description so rural and easy, that we might have 
expected it to escape even the predatory pen of a 
commentator. Hear Warburton : — " I would read 
thus — c Do paint the meadows much bedight^ u e, 
much bedecked and adorned^ as they are in spring- 
time. ' " Yet, if they are much bedight already, 
they do not require to be painted. The image has 
two sides. One looks to the eye ; the other to the 
feelings. The emotional appeal is the more affect- 
ing. But Warburton runs his pen through it, for- 
getting how that tuneful friend, whom he delighted 
tc honour, had lashed the conjecturing tribe ; — 

" Whose unwearied pains 
Made Horace dull, and humbled Maro's strains." 

The lovers of Shakspere will hope that the last 
revision of his works is inflicted. His poetry has 
been too long the orchard of editors, who leave dis- 
astrous proofs of their activity in trunks stripped of 
ivy, shattered boughs, and trampled enclosures. 
Some squalid article of intellectual dress, which 
they call an emendation, sticking among the rich 






ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 20, 

fruit, proclaims the plunderer to have been up in the 
tree. It happens, indeed, that the sentiment of 
anger is occasionally softened by a sense of the 
ridiculous. One adventurer has no sooner packed 
up his little bundle of pillage, than he is waylaid by 
a fierce contemporary on the opposite side. Then 
begin the clamour, the reproach, and the struggle. 
Pamphlets are hurled ; satirical blows are showered; 
the quarrel waxes furious : 

" Collect! flores tunicis cecidere remissis " 

The assertion of Bacon, that the most corrected 
copies of an author are commonly the least correct, 
may advantageously be stamped as an introductory 
motto for every copy of Shalcspere. 



VIII. — Taste puts an Author in a proper 
Light. 

A good reader is nearly as rare as a good writer. 
People bring their prejudices, whether friendly or 
adverse. They are lamp and spectacles, lighting 
and magnifying the page. It was a pleasant sarcasm 
of Selden, that the alchemist discovered his art in 
Virgil's golden bough, and the optician his science 
in the Annals of Tacitus. When juries of Taste 
are thus empanelled, an author may fairly claim a 
right of challenge. Passion and self-love corrupt 
verdicts. What judge would Milton have been of 
Cowley's discourse upon Cromwell ? Calvin, 
breathing flames and threats against Servetus, found 
a heresy in every line of his treatises. Trublet had 



30 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

a contemporary whose periods of contradiction 
came round in their order. To-day Corneille was 
despicable, to-morrow the prince of poets. 

It is not enough for a reader to be unprejudiced. 
He should remember that a book is to be studied, 
as a picture is hung. Not only must a bad 
light be avoided, but a good one obtained. This 
Taste supplies. It puts a history, a tale, or a poem, 
in a just- point of view, and there examines the 
execution. It causes the reader to forget himself; 
his own century vanishes. He goes out of the 
familiar into the heroic ; rides with the Cid ; laces 
the helmet of Surrey ; and flings himself among the 
magnificent knights of Tasso. His pulse beats with 
every impulse of delight and sorrow ; he braves the 
tempest with Lear, endures the picturesque torments 
of Dante, and sinks into delicious dreams in the 
Castle of Indolence. These are some of the pleasures 
of a poetical faith, which every accomplished reader 
encourages. In a theatre a candle is the sun, and a 
painted cloth stands for Venice. The credulity of 
Taste gives the like help to the illusions of authors, 
and never sits down in the same temper to the won- 
ders of Camoens and the statistics of M'Culloch. 

If an architect were to fix a ladder against a 
cathedral window on a dull November day, and 
break up with sharp scrutiny the crimson dress and 
giory of the saint, the artist's powers would dis- 
appear. Colour and expression are gone. The 
maker of the window never contemplated such an 
ordeal. 

He who disregards the object and the character of 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 3 1 

a book, inflicts on its writer an equal wrong. Con- 
sider Spenser. He calls his Faery £>ueen a perpetual 
allegory, or dark conceit. It should be read under 
the bright play of the moral, which is the sun to the 
window. In censuring the obscurity of the poem, 
we forget that its illumination is coloured. It is the 
\ustre of a ruby, not a crystal. Each thought is 
tinged by the allegory into a hue of imagination, as 
the sun in the cathedral is dyed by the glass into 
stains of amethyst and emerald. The critic who 
decomposes a stanza into common sense, is the 
architect spelling out upon his ladder the wonders of 
the window, instead of gazing up to it from the dim 
choir, when summer or autumn lights bathe the 
faces and the drapery from behind. 

No window gives all its splendours at once. It 
must be visited often. A morning or afternoon 
gleam sheds a different tincture. Moonlight wakes 
a solemn charm of its own. Winckelmann wished 
to live with a work of art as a friend. The saying 
is true of pen and pencil. Fresh lustre shoots from 
Lycidas in a twentieth perusal. The portraits of 
Clarendon are mellowed by every year of reflection. 
The conjecture had only a poetical boldness, which 
supposed that a student might linger over Shakspere, 
dwelling upon him line by line, and word by word, 
until the mind, steeped in brilliancy, would almost 
scatter light in the dark. 

Whoever has spent many days in the company or 
choice pictures, will remember the surprises that 
often reward him. When the sun strikes an evening 
scene by Both, or Berghem, in a particular direc- 



32 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

tion, the change is swift and dazzling. Every touch 
of the pencil begins to live. Buried figures arise ; 
purple robes look as if they had just been dyed ; 
cattle start up from dusky corners ; trunks of trees 
flicker with gold ; leaves flutter in light ; and a soft, 
shadowy gust — sun and breeze together — plays over 
the grass. But the charm is fleeting, as it is vivid. 
In a few minutes the sun sinks lower, or a cloud 
rolls over it ; the scene melts, the figures grow dark, 
and the whole landscape faints and dies into coldness 
and gloom. 

Life has its gay, hopeful hours which lend to the 
book a lustre, not less delightful than the accidents or 
sunshine breathe upon the picture. Every mind is 
sometimes dull. The magician of the morning may 
be the beggar of the afternoon. Now the sky or 
thought is black and cheerless ; presently it v/ill be 
painted with beauty, or spangled with stars. Taste 
varies with temper and health. There are minutes 
when the song of Fletcher is not sweeter than Pom- 
fret's. The reader must watch for the sunbeam. 
Elia puts this difficulty in a pleasant form, and 
shows us that our sympathy with the writer is 
affected by the time, or the mood in which we 
become acquainted with him : — " In the five or six li 
impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, k 
who would think of taking up the Faery Queen for 
a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' ser- 
mons ? Milton almost requires a solemn service to 
be played before you enter upon him." Only a 
zealot in Political Economy begins Adam Smith 
before breakfast j and he must be fast growing be- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 33 

numbed in metaphysics who wishes Cudworth to 
come in with the dessert. 

A celebrated author is reported to have said, " I 
know not how it is, but all my philosophy in which 
I was so warmly engaged in the morning, appears 
like nonsense as soon as I have dined." Perhaps 
Ariosto selected an unpropitious hour when he pre- 
sented his Orlando to the Cardinal D'Este, and was 
startled by the inquiry of his Eminence, " Whence 
had he gathered such a heap of fooleries ? " 

The man of taste, therefore, will choose his book, 
so far as he may, according to the season and his 
own disposition at the moment ; waiting for the 
rays that occasionally dart from it, in some happy 
transparency and warmth of the mind, as the lover 
of pictures looks for the flush of sunset on the can- 
vas. By degrees he comes to know that every 
writer makes a certain demand upon his reader. 
This is emphatically true of those inquiries or con- 
solations which concern the soul. That ancient 
Master who always rose from his knees to his 
pencil, suggests the tone of mind. The serenity of 
Wordsworth's grandest verse is not for him who re- 
ceives a box of twenty new volumes every week ; 
but for the serious, musing man, who sits at his own 
door, and 

" Like the pear, 
That overhangs his head from the green wall, 
Feeds in the sunshine." 



34 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

IX. — Books which are adapted to different 

Seasons. 

Johnson at dinner sometimes kept a book in his lap, 
wrapped up in a corner of the table-cloth ; and 
Hammond always took one of these mute friends 
to cheer his walks. Southey divided them into three 
classes : one for the table, a second for the fields, 
and a third for the coach. A closely-printed volume, 
full of texts, which the mind worked into sermons, 
was the favourite for a journey. The Colloquies of 
Erasmus stood him " in good stead " for more than 
one excursion ; and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More 
was found serviceable for another. Dr. Warton 
had a friend who, after reading a book of the Dunciad y 
always soothed himself with a canto of Spenser. 

A classification of authors to suit all hours and 
weathers might be amusing. Ariosto spans a wet 
afternoon like a rainbow. North winds and sleet 
agree with Junius. The visionary tombs of Dante 
glimmer into awfuller perspective by moonlight. 
Crabbe is never so pleasing as on the hot shingle, P 
when we can look up from his verses at the sleepy 
sea, and count the 

u Crimson weeds, which spreading flow, 
Or lie like pictures on the sands below : 
With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun 
Through the small waves so softly shines upon." 

Some books come in with lamps, and curtains, and 
fresh logs. An evening in late autumn, when there 
is no moon, and the boughs toss like foam raking its 
way back down a pebbly shore, is just the time for 
Undine. A voyage is read with deepest interest in 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 35 

winter, while the hail dashes against the window. 
Southey speaks of this delight : — 

" 'Tis pleasant by the cheerful hearth to hear 
Of tempests and the dangers of the deep, 
And pause at times, and feel that we are safe 5 
And with an eager and suspended soul, 
Woo terror to delight us." 

The sobs of the storm are musical chimes for a 
ghost-story, or one of those fearful tales with which 
the blind fiddler in Redgauntlet made " the auld car- 
lines shake on the settle, and the bits of bairns skirl 
on their minnies out frae their beds." 

Shakspere is always most welcome at the chim- 
ney-corner : so is Goldsmith : who does not wish 
Dr. Primrose to call in the evening, and Olivia to 
preside at the urn ? Elia affirms that there is no 
such thing as reading, or writing, but by a candle ; 
he is confident that Milton composed the morning 
hymn of Eden with a clear fire burning in the room ; 
and in Taylor's gorgeous description of sunrise he 
found the smell of the lamp quite overpowering. A 
living poet has charmingly sketched a family group 
enjoying the evening pleasures of literature : — 

*' At night, when all assembling round the fire, 
Closer and closer draw till they retire, 
A tale is told of India or Japan, 
Of merchants from Golcond or Astracan, 
What time wild Nature revelled unrestrained, 
And Sinbad voyaged, and the Caliphs reigned j — 
Of Knight renowned from holy Palestine, 
And Minstrels, such as swept the lyre divine, 
When Blondel came, and Richard in his cell 
Heard, as he lay, the song he knew so well ; — ■ 
Of some Norwegian, while the icy gale 
Rings in her shrouds, and beats her iron sail, 
Among the shining Alps of Polar seas 
Immoveable — for ever there to freeze ! 
And now to Venice — to a bridge, a square, 
Glittering with light — all nations masking there, 



35 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

With light reflected on the tremulous tide, 
Where gondolas in gay contusion glide, 
Answering the jest, the song on every side." 

But Elia carried his fireside theory too far. Some 
people have tried "the affectation of a book at noon- 
day in gardens and sultry arbours," without finding 
their task of love to be unlearnt. Indeed, many 
books belong to sunshine, and should be read out-of- 
doors. Clover, violets, and hedge-roses, breathe 
from their leaves ; they are most loveable in cool 
lanes, along field-paths, or upon stiles overhung by 
hawthorn ; while the blackbird pipes, and the night- 
ingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse. 
In such haunts it is soothing to wander with 
Thomson, Bloomfield, or Clare, in the hand, 

" Till declining day, 
Through the green trellis shoots a crimson ray." 

The sensation is heightened when an author is 
read amid the scenery or the manners which he 
describes ; as Barrow studied the sermons of Chry- 
sostom in his own See of Constantinople. What 
daisies sprinkle the walks of Cowper, if we take his 
Task for a companion through the lanes of Weston ! 
Under the thick hedges of Horton, darkening either 
bank of the field in the September moonlight, // 
Penseroso is still more pensive. And whoever would 
feel at his heart the deep pathos of Collins's lamenta- 
tion for Thomson, must murmur it to himself as 
he glides upon the stealing wave, by the breezy lawns 
and elms of Richmond — 

" When Thames in summer wreaths is drest, 
And oft suspend the dashing oar, 
To bid his gentle spirit rest." 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 37 

X. — Diligence the Handmaid of Taste. 

Whether a book be read from the oak lectern of a 
college library, in the parlour window, or beneath 
the trees of summer, no fruit will be gathered unless 
the thoughts are steadily given up to the perusal. 
Attention makes the genius ; all learning, fancy, and 
science, depend upon it. Newton traced back his 
discoveries to its unwearied employment. It builds 
bridges, opens new worlds, and heals diseases 5 
without it Taste is useless, and the beauties of litera- 
ture are unobserved ; as the rarest flowers bloom in 
vain, if the eye be not fixed upon the bed. 

Condillac enforces this habit of patience by an 
apt similitude. He supposes a traveller to arrive in 
the dark at a castle, which commands large views of 
the surrounding scenery. If with sunrise the shutters 
be unclosed for a moment, and then fastened, he 
catches a glimpse of the landscape, but no object is 
clearly seen or remembered — all wavers in a con- 
fusion of light and shade. But if the windows be 
kept open, the visitor receives and retains a strong 
impression of the woods, fields, and villages, that 
are spread before his eyes. 

The application of the comparison is obvious, 
Every noble book is a stronghold of the mind, built 
upon some high place of contemplation, and over- 
looking wide tracts of intellectual country. The 
unacquainted reader may be the traveller coming in 
the dark ; sunrise will represent the dawn of his 
comprehension ; and a drowsy indifference is ex- 
plained by the closing of the windows. In whatever 



38 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

degree this languor of observation is broken, gleams 
will break in upon the mind. But the shutters must 
be fastened back. The judgment and the memory- 
are required in their fulness to irradiate the subject, 
before the mental prospect stretching over the page 
can appear in its length, and breadth, and beauty. 

Attention is not often the talent of early life. For 
this cause, the exquisite verses of Virgil which are 
read in schools, excite little, if any, interest and 
delight. It was remarked by a most accomplished 
person, the late Mr. Davison, that the Principia of 
Newton, or the doctrine of Fluxions, may be under- 
stood by a youth of eighteen ; but that the Iliad, the 
Epistles of Horace, or the History of Clarendon, 
can never be embraced, until repeated efforts on the 
part of the reader himself shall have conducted him 
to that point of view, in which the writers contem- 
plated their own works. 

There is one variety of attention, which the 
humblest student may acquire. Gassendi informs 
us that Peiresc always underlined any difficult pas- 
sage, that he might return to it at a convenient 
season. Wyttenbach mentions the same practice 
in Ruhnken. Leibnitz made extracts, wrote his 
opinion upon them, and then cast the papers aside. 
Having engraved the picture on his memory, he 
destroyed the plate. The advice of a scholar, whose 
piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is 
never to be forgotten : Proportion an hour's reflec- 
tion to an hour's reading, and so dispirit the book 
into the student. Nor is the following caution less 
happy than it is quaint : — " Marshal thy notions 



ADVANTAGES, OF LiTERATURE. 39 

into a handsome method. One will carry twice as 
much weight, trussed and packed up in bundles, than 
when it lies untoward, flapping and hanging about 
his shoulders." 

Lamb prided himself on being able to read any- 
thing which in his heart he felt to be a book. He 
had no antipathies. Shaftesbury was not too genteel,, 
nor Fielding too familiar. Pope confessed his own 
miscellaneous amusements in letters, knocking at 
any door, as the storm drove. Montaigne and 
Locke were alike to him. The example is danger- 
ous. A discursive student is almost certain to fall 
into bad company. Homes of entertainment, scien- 
tific and romantic, are always open to a man who is 
trying to escape from his thoughts. But a shelter 
from the tempest is dearly bought in the house of the 
plague. Ten minutes with a French novel, or a 
German rationalist, have sent a reader away with 
a fever for life. 

Ac the first glance, all study might seem to be 
wasted which is not devoted to the greatest writer in 
each particular branch of knowledge ; but considera- 
tion shows the bold attempt to be useless. The 
exertion of mind is too much for its strength. A 
scholar of the average capacity reading an author of 
the sublimest, is a man of the common size going 
up a hill with a giant : every step is a strain ; the 
easy walk of the one is the full speed of the other. 
Frequent intervals of rest are needed. He must 
come down from the high argument into the plain. 
Over a dozen pages of Bloomfield he recovers from 
the fatigue of a morning's journey with Dante ; and 



40 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

a sermon of Blair gives him breath for another climb 
with Hooker. 

We may generalize Ben Jonson's advice to a poet 
about the choice of a master, to be honoured and 
followed until he grows very He. It is certainly 
better to set up one great light in a room, than to 
make it twinkle with a dozen tapers. Dante had 
his Virgil ; Corneille his Lucan ; Barrow his Chry- 
sostom ; Bossuet his Homer ; Chatham his Demos- 
thenes, in a translation ; Gray his Spenser. It is a 
remark of Warburton that Burke never wrote so 
well as when he imitated Bolingbroke. Tonson, the 
bookseller, seldom called upon Addison without find- 
ing Bayle's Dictionary on the table. And in our own 
times, Lamb assured Mr. Cary, that Coleridge fed | 
himself on Collins. " I guess good housekeeping," 
was the saying of Fuller, " not by the number of 
chimneys, but by the smoke." Ben Jonson's ex- 
hortation, therefore, may be received, but only in a 
large and liberal spirit. Reverence is not to be de- 
based into superstition. Choose an old field, and 
work in it ; but never sink into the serf of the pro- 
prietor. Be the lord, while you are the tiller, of the 
ground. Recollect the warning of Pliny, and bind a 
'aurel upon the plough. 



XL — Criticism, its Curiosities and 
Researches. 

Criticism is Taste put into action. A true criti- 
cism is the elegant expression of a just judgment. 
It includes Taste, of which it is the exponent and 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 41 

the supplement. The frame of Genius, with its 
intricate construction and mysterious economy, is 
the subject of study. The finest nerve of sensa- 
tion may not be overlooked. But Criticism must 
never be sharpened into anatomy. The delicate 
veins of Fancy may be traced, and the rich blood that 
gives bloom and health to the complexion of thought 
be resolved into its elements. Stop there. The life 
of the imagination, as of the body, disappears when 
we pursue it. 

Many pleasures and some advantages of literature 
are bound up in the name of Criticism. Its history 
would be the annals of the mind. An acquaintance 
with it is scarcely less necessary to the student than 
the alphabet of antiquities is to the traveller. The 
Divine Comedy should have its hand-book, as well as 
the Coliseum. Criticism is introduced in this dis- 
course only as it relates to the intellectual gratifica- 
tion of readers, and the examples offered are merely 
short aids to reflection. 

One interesting feature of Criticism is seen in the 
ease with which it discovers what Addison called the 
specific quality of an author. In Livy, it will be the 
manner of telling the story ; in Sallust, personal 
identification with the character; in Tacitus, the 
analysis of the deed into its motive. If the same 
test be applied to painters, it will find the prominent 
faculty of Correggio to be manifested in harmony of 
effect ; of Poussin, in the sentiment of his land- 
scapes ; and of Raffaelle, in the general comprehen- 
sion of his subject. 

The popular characters of authors are frequently 



42 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

only vulgar errors. They are copies of portraits for 
which the poet or the historian never sat. We have 
an example in Pindar. During how many years has 
he been called the tumultuous, the ungovernable ; as 
if his fiery and unbroken fancy, scorning the rein, 
continually ran away with his judgment. Yet Pindar 
is as methodical as Collins, or Gray. To borrow 
an illustration from his own races, he has his thoughts 
always in hand, and their fiercest plunges only carry 
the chariot nearer to the goal. 

A single thread guides the critical eye through a 
labyrinth of character. It infers the lowly station, 
as it might prove the ancientness of Homer from 
internal evidence. He tells us what a thing cost. 
Some pages of the Iliad are a priced catalogue. In 
the style of Virgil the intimation of rank is equally 
plain. He retreats from all contact with poverty. 
In the herdsman's hut, or under a tree with a shep- 
herd, he has the air of a person of quality, unbending 
into simplicity and bucolics. He receives a maple 
cup from a peasant with the grace of a courtier, who 
is thinking all the time upon the last amphora which 
Mecaenas opened. 

The history of Crabbe offers a proof of this pene- 
tration. Lord Jeffrey had remarked of his similes 
that, ingenious and elaborate as they are, they seemed 
to be the thoughtful productions of a busy and 
watchful fancy, rather than the spontaneous growth 
of a heated imagination. The poet admitted the 
conjecture to be well founded : — " Jeffrey is quite 
right ; my usual method has been to think of such 
illustrations, and insert them after finishing a tale." 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 43 

An agreeable function of Criticism is exercised in 
the recognition of a picture, or a book, by some 
distinctive expression which is ascertained to belong 
to a particular workman. A connoisseur lays his 
hand on Mieris without hesitation. He carries the 
catalogue in his eye down a gallery; spelling Rem- 
brandt in shadows, while the deep purple of a dis- 
tance prepares him for Poussin. 

The most original genius has a favourite formula. 
In Titian it is a crimson cap ; in Tintoretto, the 
lowering face of a Moor; in Wouverman, a white 
horse ; in Domenichino, an angel ; in N. Berghem, 
a woman riding on an ass ; in Hobbema, the dewy 
lustre of trees. Cuyp glows all over in a haze or 
warmth, and the liule farce upon canvas discloses 
Jan Steen. Even amid the inexhaustible fruitfulness 
of Rubens, Reynolds recognized one smooth, flat 
face, continually recurring. Every "Madonna" of 
RafFaelle is descended from the same type. The 
high, smooth, round, forehead, with the thin hair, 
re-appears in each change of posture and expression. 
The Dutch artist is the most striking instance of all. 
Under his hand, the river of Eden is a canal ; and 
he builds Babylon upon piles. 

Authors afford equaf opportunities to critical dis- 
cernment. A phrase, or an epithet in a book, is a 
particular hue, or shade, of a picture, It identifies 
the writer. We know a Chaucer, as we know a 
Van Eyck. St. Paul uses one word twenty-six 
times, and it occurs in no other part of the New 
Testament, except in the parable of the Barren Fig- 
Tree, South is discovered immediately by the 



44 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

lash of a sentence, and Andrewes by the mechanism 
of his exposition. A costly Latinism encircles the 
gold of Taylor ; and the rising incense of devotion — 
sweeter than any odours of poetry — assures a reader 
that he is bending over a homily of Leighton. 

Pope wished to have translated Homer in Asia, 
with present life to enlighten the past. In our days, 
he might have brought all Persia to his lawn. The 
printing-press has made Criticism a citizen of every 
kingdom. It is naturalised in antiquity. It talks 
with Aristotle* and lives with Cuvier. Every 
harvest-field of learning is to be gleaned. No frag- 
ment of information is without a value. If a colour 
and a word establish the relationship of a picture and 
a book, a single fact in natural history may suffice 
to disprove it. Take a simple instance. The Ba- 
trachomuomach'ia was long circulated with the Ho- 
meric poems ; but criticism is prepared to pronounce 
it spurious, from finding in it a reference to the 
cock. That bird is not mentioned in the Iliad or 
Odyssey^ and is supposed to have been a stranger in 
Greece, until the soldiers of Alexander brought 
home the jungle-fowl of India, and domesticated it 
in Europe. 

Criticism pursues with lively interest the winding 
and contrary paths, by which gifted men have 
travelled to fame. Genius is the instinct of enter- 
prise. A boy came to Mozart, wishing to compose 
something, and inquiring the way to begin. Mozart 
told him to wait. " You composed much earlier." 
" But asked nothing about it," replied the musician. 
M. Angelo is hindered in his childish studies of art ; 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 45 

RafFaelle grows up with pencil and colours for play- 
things : one neglects school to copy drawings, which 
he dared not to bring home ; the father of the other 
takes a journey to find his son a worthier teacher. 
M. Angelo forces his way ; RafFaelle is guided into 
it. But each looks for it with longing eyes. In 
some way or other, the man is tracked in the little 
footsteps of the child. Dryden marks the three 
steps of progress : — 

" What the child admired, 
The youth endeavoured, and the man ACQUIRED." 

Dryden was an example of his own theory. He 
read Polybius, with a notion of his historic exact- 
ness, before he was ten years old. Witnesses rise 
over the whole field of learning. Pope, at twelve, 
feasted his eyes in the picture-galleries of Spenser. 
Murillo filled the margin of his school-books with 
drawings. Le Brun, in the beginning of childhood, 
drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the 
house. The young Ariosto quietly watched the 
fierce gestures of his father, forgetting his displeasure 
in the joy of copying from life, into a comedy he was 
writing, the manner and speech of an old man en- 
raged with his son. 

Cowley, in the history of his own mind, shows 
the influence of boyish fancies upon later life. He 
compares them to letters cut in the bark of a young 
tree, which grow and widen with it. We are not 
surprised to hear from a schoolfellow of the Chan- 
cellor Somers that he was a weakly boy, who always 
had a book in his hand, and never looked up at the 
play of his companions ; to learn from his affection- 



46 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

ate biographer, that Hammond at Eton sought op- 
portunities of stealing away to say his prayers ; to 
read that Tournefort forsook his college class, that 
he might search for plants in the neighbouring fields ; 
or that Smeaton, in petticoats, was discovered on 
the top of his father's barn, in the act of fixing the 
model of a windmill which he had constructed. 
These early traits of character are such as we expect 
to find in the cultivated lawyer, who turned the eyes 
of his age upon Milton; in the Christian, whose life 
was one varied strain of devout praise j in the natu- 
ralist, who enriched science by his discoveries ; and 
in the engineer, who built the Eddystone Lighthouse. 

The instinct of enterprise is combined with the 
instinct of labour. Genius lights its own fire ; but 
it is constantly collecting materials to keep alive the 
flame. When a new publication was suggested to 
Addison, after the completion of the Guardian^ he 
answered, "I must now take some time, pour me 
delasser^ and lay in fuel for a future work." The 
strongest blaze soon goes out when a man always 
blows and never feeds it. Johnson declined an intro- 
duction to a popular author with the remark, that he 
did not desire to converse with a person who had 
written more than he had read. 

It is interesting to follow great authors or painters 
in their careful training and accomplishing of the 
mind. The long morning of life is spent in making 
the weapons and the armour, which manhood and 
age are to polish and prove. Usher, when only 
twenty years old, formed the daring resolution of 
reading all the Greek and Latin Fathers, and with 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 47 

the dawn of his thirty-ninth year he completed the 
task. Hammond, at Oxford, gave thirteen hours of 
the day to philosophy and classical literature, wrote 
commentaries on all, and compiled indexes for his 
own use. Milton's youthful studies were the land- 
scapes and the treasury of his blindness and want. 

The sister art teaches the same lesson. Claude 
watched every colour of the skies, the trees, the 
grass, and the water. The younger Vandervelde 
transferred the atmospheric changes to large sheets 
of blue paper, which he took in the boat when he 
went, as he said, in his Dutch-English, a " skoying" 
on the Thames. " I have neglected nothing," was 
the modest explanation which N. Poussin gave of 
his success. 

With these calls to industry in our ears, we are 
not to be deaf to the deep saying of Lord Brooke, 
the friend of Sidney, that some men overbuild their 
nature with books. The motion of our thoughts 
is impeded by too heavy a burden ; and the mind, 
like the body, is strengthened more by the warmth 
of exercise than of clothes. When Buffon and 
Hogarth pronounced genius to be nothing but labour 
and patience, they forgot history and themselves. 
The instinct must be in the mind, and the fire be 
ready to fall. Toil alone would not have produced 
the Paradise Lost^ or the Principia. The born 
dwarf never grows* to the middle size. Rousseau 
tells a story of a painter's servant, who resolved to 
be the rival or the conqueror of his master. He 
abandoned his livery to live by his pencil. But, in- 
stead of the Louvre, he stopped at a sign- post. Mere 



4 3 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

learning is only a compiler, and manages the pen as 
the compositor picks out the type — each sets up a 
book with the hand. Stone-masons collected the 
dome of St. Paul's, but Wren hung it in air. 

Ease, when it has become constitutional, is called 
Grace. Until he had got his one tune by heart, 
Gibbon wrote slowly. The simpler periods of Gold- 
smith flowed with painful effort. " Everybody," 
was his own complaint, " wrote better, because he 
wrote faster than I." Cowper confesses that his 
pleasant Task was constructed with weariness and 
watching. Burke's gorgeous imagery had very little 
of that rush which is commonly heard in it. Addi- 
son wore out the patience of his printer ; and 
Dr. Warton assures us, that when a whole impres- 
sion of a Spectator was nearly worked off, he would 
frequently stop the press to insert a new preposition. 

The authority of Pope may seem to contradict 
the argument. He declared that what he wrote the 
quickest pleased him best, as the Essay on Criticism^ 
the Rape of the Lock y and a large portion of the Iliad. 
But the miracle melts as we look at it. Of the first 
poem the materials were previously digested in prose ; 
the Sylph-machinery was a supplement to the second ; 
and the manuscript of the third may be consulted in 
our National Library. A truer portrait of the poet 
in his study will be found in his elegant epistle to 
Jervas, where he reminds his friend of their medita- 
tive hours, — 

" How oft in pleasing tasks we wear the day, 
While summer suns roll unperceived away ! 
How oft our slowly -growing works impart. 
While images reflect from art to art." 



ADVANTAGES OF LITERATURE. 49 

Speed in composition is a questionable advantage. 
Poetic history records two names which may repre- 
sent the swift and the thoughtful pen — Lope de Vega 
and Milton. We see one pouring out verses more 
rapidly than a secretary could write them ; the other 
building up, in the watches of the dark, a few 
majestic lines ; one leaving his treasures to be easily 
compressed into a single volume ; the other, to be 
spread abundantly over forty-six quartos; one gain- 
ing fifteen pounds ; the other, a hundred thousand 
ducats ; one sitting at the door of his house, when the 
sun shone, in a coarse coat of gray cloth, and visited 
only by admiring strangers from foreign countries ; 
the other followed by crowds whenever he appeared, 
while even the children shouted after him with 
delight. 

It is only since the earth has fallen on both, that 
the fame and the honours of the Spaniard and the 
Englishman have been changed. He who nearly 
finished a comedy before breakfast, now lies motion- 
less in his small niche of monumental biography; 
and he who, long choosing, began late, is walking 
up and down in his singing robes, and with the 
laurel round his head, in the cities of many lands ; 
having his home and his welcome in every devout 
heart, and upon every learned tongue of the Christian 
world. 

Of course, the frequent writer will, in time, be 
quick. The practised" is the ready hand. Raffaelle, 
who painted a head with such fine touches that it 
seems to have been finished by single hairs, could 
almost work as fast as Rembrandt, who laid on 



50 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

his colour with a palette-knife. Dryden's mastery 
of language and rhyme enabled him to remit to 
Tonson an instalment of seven thousand five hun- 
dred verses ; Johnson, from the fulness of his mind, 
produced Rasselas in the evenings of one week j 
and Scott wrote the two last volumes of Waverley in 
twenty-six afternoons of summer. 

Genius easily hews out its figure from the block ; 
but the sleepless chisel gives it life. We have, in 
the practice of Titian, an interesting view of the 
steps by which excellence is won. He began a 
picture by striking off" an outline in four pencillings \ 
he then put it aside, sometimes allowing months to 
go by before he looked at it again ; when he returned 
to his work, it was with the watchfulness of a rival. 
The last corrections were given by daily touches. 
Virgil composed verses in the same manner. He 
commenced a figure or a landscape in rough sketches. 
Rare drawings of a painter should we have found in 
his scattered notes ! What studies did he make of 
that Carthaginian queen, before she rose from his 
poetry in the splendour of her charms ! He pro- 
duced a few lines in the morning, and spent days or 
months in shaping and adorning them. He was the 
artist rubbing in tints over the delicate surface of 
words — 

" And Titian s colour looks like Virgil's art." 

Buffon has told us how patiently he moulded his 
loose sentences into symmetry. So often did he 
turn a paragraph in his mind and on his tongue — 
speaking it over and over until his ear was satisfied 



ADVANTAGES OF LITERATURE. 5 1 

— that he was able to repeat whole pages of his 
works. 

This transparency of diction is only found in pro- 
ductions of the strongest Genius. A burning in- 
vention makes it. That exquisite material, through 
which we gaze on our woods and gardens, obtains 
its crystalline beauty after undergoing the processes 
of the furnace. It was melted by fire before the 
rough particles of sand disappeared, and the fibres ot 
the leaf, or the streaks of the tulip, were discerned. 
Similar operations refine language. Imagination 
mingles the harsh elements of composition until — 
each coarse, shapeless word being absorbed by the 
heat — they brighten into that smooth and unclouded 
style, through which the slightest emotions of the 
heart, and the faintest colours of fancy, are reflected. 

The theologian, the poet, the historian, or the 
philosopher, who has this lucidness of utterance, is 
certain of a wide and lasting reputation. It made 
Ariosto the Homer of Italy, and gathered all ranks 
and ages to his knees. Taste and Science, Love 
and Beauty, hung upon his lips. He was the com- 
panion of the maiden and the scholar, of a starry 
Galileo, and a knight in armour. 

Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not 
keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the 
window in the landscape it displays. A fine style 
gives the view of Fancy — its figures, its trees, or its 
palaces — without a spot. But to a diseased eye, 
crystal is cold. Hence it happens that the lawful 
masters of language are sometimes deposed, for a 
eason, by the daring of literary revolutionists. A 



52 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

barbaric uproar drowns the musical voices of Addison 
and his brethren. One idiom jangles another out 
of tune. In reading some modern authors, who 
have nothing of the tripod or the oracle, except the 
frenzy and the darkness, we are reminded of the 
pleasant correction which Menage inserted in the 
Delices d? Esprit of a flighty Frenchman : " Au lieu 
de Delices, lisez Delires." 

The exhibition of real strength is never grotesque. 
Distortion is the agony of weakness. It is the dis- 
located mind whose movements are spasmodic. Pres- 
sure of thought may overburden sentences with 
meaning, as in the Analogy of Butler, or in the 
rhymes of Cowley. Swift confessed to Pope that 
he had been obliged to read parts of the Essay on 
Man twice over. It was not obscure, but deep. 
The Bard of Gray and Collins' s Ode on the poetical 
character seem dark ; the former from its historical, 
the latter from its metaphysical, allusions. Nume- 
rous passages of Milton are incomprehensible to a 
reader whose knowledge is not large in chivalry, 
romance, or classical legends. Take the magnificent 
description of Satan arming his legions, and feeling 
his heart swell with pride, as he gazes upon the 
myriads before him : — 

" For never since created man 
Met such imbodied force, as named with these 
Could merit more than that small infantry 
Warr'd on by cranes ; though all the giant brood 
Of Phlegra with th' heroic race were join'd 
That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side 
Mix'd with auxiliar gods ; and what resounds 
In fable or romance of Uther's son, 
Begirt with British and Armoric knights ; 
And all who since, baptized or infidel, 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 53 

Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, 
Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, 
Or whom Biserta sent from Africshore, 
When Charlemain, with all his peerage, fell 
By Fontarabia." 

In such cases, notes, which are the dictionary or 
ignorance, will open the chambers of imagery to one 
who knocks ; and when the sentiment, or the illus- 
tration, has been disengaged, it delights the eye of 
taste by its symmetry or grandeur, A foreign writer 
may fairly claim of his reader a sufficient acquaint- 
ance with the language. The idioms of Genius will 
always present obscurities to the uninformed ; they 
are to be acquired, as a man learns to translate a 
dialect. When the reader is competent, Genius is 
bright. We do not expect Waller to appreciate 
Milton. But, in general, he who understands him- 
self is easily understood. " The man who is not 
intelligible, is not intelligent." 



XII. — Criticism enforces Unity of Purpose. 

He runs uncertainly who has two goals. The flight 
becomes a flutter ; the race, a circle. Raffaelle 
might lay down his pencil to build a cathedral ; and 
L. da Vinci fill a page with a problem and a carica- 
ture. Some gifted adventurer is always sailing round 
the world of art and science, to bring home costly 
merchandise from every port. But the warning 
truth still remains : — 

te One science only will one genius fit: 
So wide is art, so narrow human wit," 

No fact in ancient history is less disputable than 



54 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

its divisions. The Greek stage encouraged no Gar- 
rick to smile away pathos in farce. The maddened 
Orestes never disappeared in the mimic of the Clouds. 

The caution is wise : poet and hero are weak on 
one side. Milton's humour and Hobbes' poetry are 
among the saddest exhibitions of literature. Bentley's 
hand forgot its cunning when he laid it on Paradise 
Lost. Longinus says, that as often as Demosthenes 
affected to be pleasant in a speech, he made himself 
ridiculous ; and if he happened to raise a laugh, it 
was chiefly upon himself. Dante showed an imper- 
fect acquaintance with the capacities of Art, when he 
recommended the Revelation of S. John to Giotto, 
as a subject for the pencil. The enemies of Boileau 
beheld him shorn in an ode ; Corneille stumbled in 
comedy ; Sterne was beaten by his valet in learning 
Italian ; and a regimental schoolmaster might have 
taken down Marlborough in spelling. Instances of 
intellectual infirmity are seen admonishing the scholar 
upon every side. Some muscle, or nerve, of arm or 
of eye, is always weak. Pope tossed Theobald into 
the Dunciad^ but he, clinging to the back of Shak- 
spere, out-ran his tormentor as an editor. The 
illustration of Temple is forcible as it is homely: — 
" The abilities of man must fall short on one side or 
other, like too scanty a blanket when you are a-bed : 
if you pull it upon your shoulders, you leave your 
feet bare; if you thrust it down upon your feet, your 
shoulders are uncovered." 

Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches \ 
her children to venerate the single eye. Remember 
Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breath- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 55 

ing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. 
But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has 
caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of 
exquisite beauty are seen and loved ; but the old 
nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. 
Pathos staggers on the edge of farce. The sacred 
pictures of Matsys are the sermons of Sterne. 

Talents to strike the eye of posterity should be 
concentrated. Rays, powerless while they are scat- 
tered, burn in a point.. Great men have always 
one governing series of thoughts. We are not sur- 
prised to be told that a fly interested Malebranche 
more than all the Greek and Roman history. 
Milton's confession about having only the use of his 
left hand in prose, is a text and a homily in Criticism. 

The thought is pleasing, though visionary, that 
authors might reap a larger harvest, by Writing books 
as the brothers Both painted landscapes, or as Ru- 
bens and Snyders sometimes worked together. Pope 
was enriched by the gold of Bolingbroke, notwith- 
standing its alloy. Would not Shakspere and Ben 
Jonson have played a grander strain in concert ? 
It is certain that the revision of friends often imparts 
a new lustre. In this way Lucretius grew brighter 
under the pen of Cicero ; the Maxims of Rochefou- 
cault received the exquisite temper of their edge ; 
the sharpest eyes in Port Royal picked out the over- 
looked weeds of Pascal, or gathered passages for his 
Provincial Letters; and the friendly solicitude of 
Seeker disentangled the intricate argument of Butler. 



56 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 



XII. — Criticism the Source of 
Delights. 

Every river flows into branching streams — pleasant 
to the eye and the ear — that lose themselves among 
green meadows, or the pebbles of village brooks. 
Criticism, pursuing its way through the fruitful 
country of learning, detaches from its current many 
small tributaries, of which each has its own little 
patches of corn-land and trees to wander along. All 
possess interest for the patient explorer ; whether 
he considers the varying times of the mind's flower 
and ripeness, the influence of air and climate upon 
its bloom and growth, the art of repairing injured 
works, or the obligations of authors to their prede- 
cessors. 

(1.) Lord Bacon considered that invention in 
young men is livelier than in old, and that imagina- 
tions stream into their minds more divinely. He 
has not defined the boundary of youth. His own 
thirty-sixth year had come, when he committed to 
the press those golden meditations which he called 
Essays. But it is noticeable that his style opened 
into richer bloom with every added summer of 
thought. Later editions contain passages of beauty 
not found in the earlier ; and his Advancement of 
Learning, published when he was forty-four, beams 
with the warmest lights of Fancy. His contempo- 
rary Hobbes was sixty-three before he put forth his 
evil claim to be remembered in the Leviathan. Sterne 
was forty-six when Tristram brought London to his 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 57 

door, and furnished him with the boast that he was 
engaged to dinners fourteen deep. I turn to greater 
examples. Shakspere concluded his dramatic life 
afr forty-seven, with the charming story of the 
Tempest^ of his Plays the most joyous and airy ; 
it is probable that Milton had reached the same age 
when he began the Paradise Lost, Why should the 
broad river become narrower while unnumbered 
springs continue to flow into it ? Raffaelle died in 
his thirty-eighth year, with his hand on the " Trans- 
figuration j" are we to look upon that picture as the 
mightiest effort of an art that could climb no higher? 
Was there no fourth manner for the solemn light and 
stillness of riper manhood, which would have melted 
warmer colours into his earlier drawing, speaking 
more fervently to the eye, without weakening his 
appeal to the affections ? 

It is impossible to make absolute laws for the 
mind. It has seasons of ripeness and beauty when 
the colour and the flavour of its fruit are in perfec- 
tion. But they are irregular ; sometimes they come 
early. Ben Jonson wrote Every Man in his Humour 
at twenty-two ; and Paul Potter dropped his pencil 
before he was twenty-nine. Occasionally the life 
of the intellect seems to run itself out in one effort. 
All the fine juice of the vine flows into a single 
grap$. Zurbaran's early picture divided with Raf- 
faelle the applause of criticism in the Louvre. Aken- 
side, at twenty-three, had a lustre of invention which 
each succeeding year seems to have diminished. It 
might be that the scholar over-laid the poet ; that 
the essence of his fancy was drawn off in the Labo- 



58 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

ratory ; or that the torrent of youth brought down 
a few lumps of gold, and his mind had no rich vein 
imbedded in it, for the full strength of manhood to 
work. f 

Sometimes the flower unfolds itself in the noon. 
Francia stood on the threshold of his fortieth year 
when a picture by Perugino made him a painter. 
In a few instances, it keeps its choicest odours for 
the evening, or the night. Dryden was nearly 
seventy when he completed his charming copies of 
Chaucer : a cripple, he tells us, in his limbs, but 
conscious of no decay in the faculties of his soul, 
excepting that his memory was somewhat weaker, 
and to compensate for this loss tie found his judg- 
ment increased. " Thoughts come crowding in so 
fast upon me that the only difficulty is to choose or 1 
to reject." 

M. Angelo had nearly reached the years of Dryden 
when he gave the " Last Judgment" to the world. 
The splendour of Titian shone most towards its ' 
setting; his wonderful portrait of Pope Paul the 
Third was painted at seventy-two, and his magni- 
ficent " Martyrdom of St. Lawrence" at eighty-one. •' 
Sixty-four summers only mellowed into ruddier tints l J 
the nosegay of Rubens ; and Buffon assured a friend 
that, after passing fifty years over his desk, he was 
every day learning to write. 

But though the times of fruit-bearing may vary in 
different minds, we generally find that several fine \ 
seasons follow each other in succession. Consider 
the five years of Milton's life, between 1634 and 
1639, wnen ne wrote Comus, Lycldas, Arcades, and 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 59 

his shorter poems ; take the same period in the his- 
tory of Shakspere, beginning in 1606 with Macbeth^ 
and ending, in 1611, with Othello; or cut ofF an 
equal length from the record of Jeremy Taylor's 
struggles and toils : see him contributing to his own 
and every age, between 1647 and 1652, the Liberty 
of Prophesying, the Great Exemplar, the Holy Living 
and Dying, and all his nobler sermons. These are 
precious chapters in the biography of Genius ; we 
ought not to be surprised if some pages of weaker 
interest are found before or after them. 

Walking in the fields during the last summer, I 
saw the sun — then going down in great glory — sud- 
denly cut in two by a strip of dark cloud, which, 
nevertheless, showed itself by the colour dimly 
shining through it to be connected with that magni- 
ficent luminary ; and while I stood, the vapour 
melted, and the sun re-appeared in all its large efful- 
gence. My thoughts turned to the great lights 
which have been given to rule the intellectual day. 
I called to remembrance how the broad splendour of 
Genius, as it rolls along the sky of life from the 
morning until the evening, has its cold intervals of 
shadow. The radiance of its manifestation is often 
broken. An inferior book or picture comes between 
the rising and the setting glory. A black bar of 
cloud seems to cut the great light in the middle. It 
is a noble and comforting recollection that when the 
gloom passes the mind breaks forth again, and the 
poet or the philosopher sinks behind the horizon of 
time, as he rose above it, in a full orb. 

The light of the morning and the evening is 



60 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

equally beautifnl, but it differs in tone and hue. So 
does the Imagination in the young and the old. Yet 
it may stream divinely into each. The tender green 
and the nightingale's hymn belong to the spring ; 
the full rose and the red moon, to the summer and 
the harvest. The portraitures of dreams upon the 
eyes under trees, the smiles of love, and the enchant- 
ments of hope, are the joy and the heritage of 
youth ; the guardianship of angels, the victories of 
the soul, and the calm beauty of Paradise, are the 
illumination and the reward of manhood and age. 

(2.) It has been a subject of ingenious speculation 
if country, or weather, may be said to cherish or check 
intellectual growth. Jeremy Collier considered that 
the understanding needs a kind climate for its health, 
and that a reader of nice observation might ascertain 
from the book in what latitude, season, or circum- 
stances, it had been written. The opponents are 
powerful. Reynolds ridiculed the notion of thoughts 
shooting forth with greater vigour at the summer 
solstice or the equinox j Johnson called it a fantastic 
foppery. 

The atmospheric theory is as old as Homer. Its 
laureate is Montesquieu. The more northerly you 
go, he said, the sterner the man grows. You must 
scorch a Muscovite to make him feel. Gray was a • 
convert. One of the prose hints for his noble frag- 
ment of a didactic poem runs thus : — u It is the 
proper work of education and government united to 
redress the faults that arise from the soil and air.'' 
Berkeley entertained the same feeling. Writing to 
Pope from Leghorn, and alluding to some half- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 6l 

formed design he had heard him mention of visiting 
Italy, he continues : — " What might we not expect 
from a Muse that sings so well in the bleak climate 
of England, if she felt the same warm sun, and 
breathed the same air, with Virgil and Horace ? " 

When Dyer attributes the faults of his Fleece to 
the Lincolnshire fens, he only awakes a smile. 
Keats wrote his Ode to a nightingale — a poem full 
of the sweet south — at the foot of Highgate-hill. 
But we have the remark of Dryden — probably the 
result of his own experience — that a cloudy day is 
able to alter the thoughts of a man ; and, generally, 
the air we breathe, and the objects we see, have a 
secret influence upon our imagination. Burke was 
certain that Milton composed 77 Penseroso in the 
long-resounding aisle of a mouldering cloister, or 
ivied abbey. He beheld its solemn gloom in the 
verse. The fine nerves of the mind are braced, and 
the strings of the harp are tuned, by different kinds 
of temperature. " I think," Warburton remarked 
to Hurd, " you have often heard me say, that my 
delicious season is the autumn — the season which 
gives most life and vigour to my intellectual faculties. 
The light mists, or, as Milton calls them, the steams 
that rise from the fields in one of these mornings, 
give the same relief to the views that the blue of the 
plum gives to the appetite." 

Mozart composed, whenever he had the opportun- 
ity, in the soft air of fine weather. His Don Gio- 
vanni and the Requiem were written in a bowling- 
green and a garden. Chatterton found a full moon 
favourable to poetic invention, and he often sat up 



62 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

all night to enjoy its solemn shining. The spirits 
of Shelley rose joyously whenever the wind blew from 
the north-west. Winter-time was most agreeable 
to Crabbe. He delighted in a heavy fall of snow, 
and it was during a severe storm which blocked him 
within doors, that he portrayed the strange miseries 
of Sir Eustace Grey. 

(3.) The art of emendation demands the union ot 
many talents. Porson adjusting the text of Euri- 
pides, is the architect restoring a palace. The pur- 
suit of Genius into its treasure-house is an inferior, 
but a more interesting accomplishment. It is one 
which all readers may share, and which deserves to 
be called a pleasure, if not an object and advantage, 
of literature. The need of it is the greater, as me- 
mories are often weak. Addison copied into the 
Spectator^ from an Italian ethical work of the six- 
teenth century, a story about a mirror and a lady, 
but omitted to state its foreign descent. The occu- 
pation is to be enjoyed with caution. A coincidence 
is not a robbery. The most agreeable of all satirists 
has playfully exhibited a clever curiosity gone astray, 
in the portrait of a scholar who reads all books : — 

" And all he reads assails, 
From DryderTs Fables down to Durfey's tales ; 
With him most authors steal their works — not buy : 
Garth did not write his own Dispensary." 

Swift seems to indicate the fair distinction between 
the theft of the scribbler and the loan of the author, 
by saying that the lighting a candle at a neighbour's 
fire does not affect our property in the wick and 
flame. Milton held a torch to Ovid, and Taylor to 
Chrysostom. But both carried materials for burn- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 63 

ing. The ignible substance belonged to them- 
selves. 

Some imitation is involuntary and unconscious. 
No mighty intellect can be lost. Time only covers 
to reproduce it : there is nothing in the poet, or the 
philosopher, 

" But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange." 

Plato dies in the school to appear in the pulpit. 
Genius is nourished from within and without. Its 
food is self-grown and gathered. Like a rich-bearing 
tree, it absorbs the juices of the soil and the balm 
of the air, but draws from its own blood the life that 
swells out the trunk, and gives colour and flavour 
to the fruit. 



XIV. — The Lessons of Criticism. 

(1.) An artist once objected to a famous painter, 
that he could never tell where, in nature, he found 
those gorgeous hues, which seem to inflame his 
landscape, and shower purple and crimson over the 
field and the river. The ear of Society caught up the 
reply, — M I dare say that you never see such colours ; 
but do you not wish that you could ? " 

One of the lessons of Criticism is the folly of" 
making our own knowledge a standard of probability. 
Consider the bone of a reptile in the hand of a 
ploughman, and of Owen. The common observer 
notices only one hue of green, while the cultivated 
eye perceives a gray tint in the sun's reflection on 
leaves and grass. An Abyssinian traveller saw in 



64 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

the Bay of Tajoura the azure and gold of the most 
extravagant picture ; and Mrs. Houstoun speaks of 
the autumn foliage in American woods as bewilder- 
ing the describer by its dazzling varieties. " If a 
painter were to endeavour to depict them to life, he 
would be called as mad a's Turner." A testimony 
yet more extraordinary is heard in Colonel Mitchell's 
exploring expedition into the interior of Tropical 
Australia. One day his path conducted him into a 
valley so sublimely grotesque that he called it u Sal- 
vator Rosa." A river was surrounded by hills, of 
which some took the shape of cathedrals in ruins, 
and others of decayed fortifications. The comparison 
that the scene suggested to the visitor was a sepia 
landscape of Martin. 

Poetical images — which are the lights and land- 
scapes of fancy — claim the benefit of these illustra- 
tions. There are deep recesses of feeling in the 
heart of Genius, which seem not less marvellous to 
the common reader, than the Australian vale was to 
the traveller. What is unknown is not impossible. 
Disbelief of things because they are contrary to our 
experience is fatal to entertainment and truth, both 
in literature and in morals. 

A trifling circumstance occurs to me in Thom- 
son's account of the Dorsetshire Downs, where he 
speaks of their woody slopes dipping into shadow, 
the broad patches of corn-land, and enormous flocks 
scattered over uninhabited tracts of country — these 
he calls " white. But the epithet was an accom- | 
modation of truth to poetical custom ; when he 
composed the Seasons, the sheep of Dorset were ,j 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 65 

usually washed with red ochre. Suppose that he 
had preserved this local peculiarity, and writ- 
ten : — 

" Pure Dorsetian downs 
The boundless prospect spread, here shagged with woods, 
There rich with harvests, and there red with sheep ; " 

the whole array of town critics would have been in 
arms, impatient for the assault, yet certain of defeat. 
The amplest knowledge has the largest faith. Igno- 
rance is always incredulous. Tell an English cot- 
tager that the belfries of Swedish churches are crim- 
son, and his own white steeple furnishes him with a 
contradiction. 

(2.) Criticism checks admiration in its excess. 
Literature has its superstitions and its intolerance. 
An acute scholar remarked that there is not an 
anomaly of grammar, or metre, in Milton, which has 
not been praised as a beauty. Raffaelleis injured by 
the same idolatry. Look at the miraculous " Draught 
of Fishes." What a boat! Richardson saw in it 
only the choice of a lesser evil, and wonderful skill 
in overcoming it ; but Opie has proved that the re- 
sources of art might easily have subdued the dif- 
ficulty without offence to the judgment. What is 
true of RafFaelle's commentators in one instance, is 
true of Shakspere's continually ; in the eyes of his 
worshippers the idol is faultless. An ingenious 
writer compared his poetry to St. Peter's at Rome, 
and recommended the reader of the drama — like the 
visitor in the church — when displeased by a spot to 
take a step further and gaze upon a beauty. The 
advice is good, if the blemish be not vaunted as a 

F 



66 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

charm. There ought to be some strong shades be- 
tween the devotee and the heretic. 

We have authors in morocco who would not be 
recognized by their contemporaries — they are so 
bedizened with dress, and spangled with flattery. 
Much of this exaggerated praise may be resolved into 
self-love. The critic, like the traveller, scrawls his 
name upon a Pyramid. Jones lives with Cheops ; 
Drake with Shakspere. 

It was an observation of Pope, that poets, who 
are always afraid of envy, have quite as much reason 
to be alarmed at admiration. He looked upon Shaks- 
pere as writing to the people without views of re- 
putation, and having, at his first appearance, no other 
aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence j 
or, as he puts the opinion in his poignant verse — 

"Shakspere (whom you and every play-house bill 
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will) 
For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight, 
And grew immortal in his own despite." 

Shakspere himself confirms Pope's estimate of 
his character. He made his fortune, and forgot his 
plays. Having created a home and a treasure, he 
threw away the wand. It had done its work in 
sending him to Stratford. We shall find a profitable 
moral in Goldsmith's amusing complaint that he was 
regarded as a partizan, when his only object was to ! 
write a book that would sell. 

A deep reverence for the Poet may be combined 
with the liveliest sense of his weakness and false 
taste. His magnificent images, his loving wisdom, 
and his noble sentiments, were the beamings of that 
sun-like mind which shone over the whole world of' 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 67 

nature and fancy ; they were inseparably his own. 

i His mock-fights, his artificial thunder, his quibbles 
and grossness, were chiefly outward accidents of 

; situation and circumstances. They were so many 
fragments from his festival of imagination and humour, 

J scornfully flung to stay the hunger of the Pit. 

Why should Shakspere escape the common lot ? 
Works of Genius must be imperfect. Irregularity 

] is a law of their existence and splendour. Brilliancy, 
twilight, and shadow, are so many inequalities of 

i surface along a body essentially luminous. Criticism, 
which does not observe the gloom, is like an im- 
perfect telescope that discovers no spots in the sun. 
The true observer admits the polemical flatness of 
Paradise Lost^ and the overloading sombreness of 
Rembrandt's " Night-Watch/' The low comedy 
of Damaetas and Mopsa displeases his ear in the 
Arcadia of Sidney, and he wishes to shade away the 
deep lamp-black in the " Transfiguration" of Raf- 
faelle. His love of Spenser does not reconcile his 
eye to a woodman in Lincoln green during the en- 
chanted reign of Arthur; and he thinks that S. 
Rosa might have selected a fitter ornament than a 
cannon for the tent of Holofernes. 

Criticism has more dignified duties and nobler 
pleasures than these. It is the protector of the un- 
friended, and the avenger of the smitten. Newton 
found that a star, examined through a glass tarnished 
by smoke, was diminished into a speck of light. 
But no smoke ever breathed so thick a mist as envy 
or detraction. If Milton had come to us in the 
ent of Waller, his original brightness would 



: ! judgmc 



68 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

have sunk into a glimmer. Inferior talents sufFei 
in their degree. South ey spoke of Flecknoe as 
far from being the despicable scribbler, whom 
Dryden pelted with such contumely ; and Johnson 
desired to see the collected works of that Dennis, 
who is beheld by most people bespattered and raving 
in the pillory of Pone. 

We may learn from the poet what perils are en- 
countered by merit. He published his Essay on 
Man without his name. Mallet, a noisy contractor of 
literary all-work, called at Twickenham soon after its 
appearance. Pope, who delighted to do everything by' 
stratagem, inquired the news of books. His visitor 
informed him that the latest publication was some- 
thing about Man : that he had glanced at it, but detect- 
ing the incompetency of the writer, soon tossed m 
aside. Pope with exquisite cruelty told him the secret.. 

Pope might sit in his grotto, and amuse himself 
with inventing new tortures for the purgatory of( 
Dunces : his fame and his fortune were sure. But 
suppose the author of the Essay to have been m 
genius struggling up the hill — a Chatterton with m 
Walpole for a patron, — that pert falsehood of Mallet 
might have overset all his hopes. How often has 
such a catastrophe befallen the worthiest adventurer I 
Putting to sea with his first freight, the enemy — ini, 
the strong image of Jeremy Collier — has fired the ( 
beacons, drawn down the posse at his landing, and 
charged him while he was staggering on the beach. L 

In such cases Criticism appears like some god-^ 
dess in Homeric warfare — awful, yet sweet. Insulted 
intellect is crowned after its death ; and the eloquent. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 69 

panegyric is a chamber where the author lies in state. 
The scorn and the anguish of a life are recompensed 
by the magnificence of the mourning ; while a beau- 
tiful colour seems to bathe the sleeper from the 
overhanging canopy. These funeral rites should be 
reserved for the princes of learning. Criticism 
bribed by the affections, by passion, or by interest, 
sometimes arrays the usurper in the trappings or 
royalty. Flattery sits at the head with its crown 
and sceptre 3 the bier is emblazoned with escutcheons. 
But rank in literature is neither inherited nor be- 
stowed. If the soul of Genius did not animate the 
author, his collapsed reputation is only lifted up like 
the body of Arvalan in Eastern story. The motion 
comes from the tread of the bearers, as the powerless, 
bloodless frame sways to and fro with its own 
ungoverned and corrupting weight. 

This Discourse scarcely presumes to speak of 
Criticism, as it now lives and flourishes. Much, 
however, of the pleasure of literature arises out or 
its skilful exercise. If there be in it little of the 
splenetic heart of a former century, there is abun- 
dance of untimely fruit, and confident foreheads. 
Its defects are twofold, — a want of modesty, and a 
want of knowledge. A remedy for the former is to 
be found in the removal of the latter. A silent no- 
viciate of five years would sow the mind. The 
truest critic, like the deepest philosopher, will pro- 
duce his opinions as doubts. Only the astrologer 
and the empyric never fail. 

A thoughtful person is struck by the despotic 
teaching of the modern school. The decisions of 



JO PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

the eighteenth century are reversed, and the au- 
thority of the judges is ignored. Addison's chair is 
filled by Hazlitt ; a German mist intercepts Hurd. 
Our classical writers daily recede further from the 
public eye. Milton is visited like a monument. 
The scholarly hand alone brushes the dust from 
Dryden. The result is unhappy. Critics and 
readers, by a sort of necessity, refer every production 
of the mind to a modern standard. The age weighs 
itself. One dwarf is measured by another. The 
fanciful lyrist looks tall when Pindar is put out of 
sight. This is like boarding up Westminster Abbey, 
and all the cathedrals, and deciding on the merits of 
a church, by comparing it with the newest Gothic 
design that, sent too soon to the roadside, implores 
of every passer-by the charity of a steeple. 



XV. — Poetry, its Shapes and Beauties. 






Poetry is the first Pleasure of Literature that cap- 
tivates the eye and the heart. It is the pearl shining 
in the bosom of the story. Whatever of beautiful, 
instructive, or alluring, belongs to Philosophy, His- 
tory, or Fiction, is wrapped up in Poetry. It sets 
the hardest lessons to music. Epicurus might have 
rejoiced to send his pupils to Lucretius, and the 
Roman farmer have found his text-book in the 
Georgics. Such charms have endeared Poetry. 

The Temple of Fame contains no sepulchres so 
beautified by love as those of the poets. Their 
memory is bound up with the histories of kings and 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 7 1 

nobles. Davenant records, in musical prose, some 
of the rare achievements of minstrelsy. A tyrant 
lived with the praise and died with the blessing of 
Greece, for gathering the dust of Homer into an 
urn ; Thebes was preserved by the harp of Pindar j 
the elder Scipio lay in the bosom of Ennius ; Lae- 
lius was flattered by the rumour of his helping 
Terence ; Virgil brightened the purple of an Em- 
peror ; and the Capitol shouted for Petrarch. 

Poetry deserves the honour it obtains as the eldest 
offspring of Literature, and the fairest. It is the 
fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower, 
and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty 
and colour, which differ with the soil that receives 
and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it 
comes up the rose of Haflz ; in England, the many- 
blossomed tree of Shakspere. 

Poetry is the making of thought. He who finds, 
creates. The Poet calls shadows into the crystal of 
memory, as the Charmer, in old times, peopled his 
glass with faces of the absent. Mirrors of magic 
may represent the inventions of the minstrel. The 
Phantasy of the Greeks, the Vision of the Latins, 
and the Imagination of ourselves, signify the same 
work of the mind, the causing to appear. 

Imagination is the union of likenesses, and their 
exhibition in new forms. It is composed of several 
conceptions folded into each other. For example 
— The memory entertains an idea of a palace ; 
Imagination embellishes it with splendid apartments, 
crowns it with gilded pinnacles, or embosoms it in 
gardens. The strange animal of the traveller bristles 



72 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

into the Dragon of Spenser. The Helen of Zeuxis 
was the blended harmony and bloom of a five-fold 
loveliness ; and the Hercules of Glycon showed the 
ennobled symmetry of his most athletic contempo- 
raries. Raffaelle and Guido professed to have their 
model enshrined in one certain Idea of beauty j yet 
it was not created in the mind. The features of 
life, in its purest developments, were spiritualized by 
Imagination. A common face is thrown upon the 
glass, and the sun brightens it. The smallest seed 
may contain the flower. The Greek sculptor never 
saw Jupiter, but he had gazed upon heroes. Milton 
walked in a garden before he planted Eden. 

In this way the most exquisite combinations of the 
Poet are traced back to their beginnings ; whether 
Milton dazzles us with the flash of unnumbered 
swords in his dark Consistory ; or Virgil brings 
Minerva shouting to the Greeks in the flames of 
Troy ; or Tasso illuminates the hill-top with the 
feet of an angel ; or Shelley compares life to a dome 
of glass which 

** Stains the white radiance of Eternity ;" 

in each case the writer had something to work 
upon. The outline lay in his recollection. The 
visible led him to the unseen. The conception 
opened into the image. 

If we divide Poetry into Classic and Romantic, 
the former will be found to delight most the taste 
and the heart ; the latter, the imagination and the 
senses. A flowing outline of calm dignity marks 
the Parthenon and Samson Agonistes. Broken shadows, 
mystery, and awe, endear an old Gothic house and a 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE* 73 

canto of Spenser. The enchanted forest of Tasso 
casts a dread fuller shade over the thoughts than the 
grove of Lucan. Warton supposes a reader to be 
more impressed by the black plumes on the helmet 
in Otranto^ and the gigantic arm on the great stair- 
case, than by any paintings of Ovid or Apuleius. 

By whatever name the beautiful in thought may 
be distinguished — Classic or Gothic, Descriptive or 
Philosophical — the lover of fancy welcomes it. He 
drinks at every fountain of taste. In each colour 
and bend of the wide landscape he discovers some- 
thing to admire : the cloud- capt battlements and 
flashing standards of the Epic ; the dim mountain 
heights of the Contemplative ; the sunny slope of the 
Pastoral ; or the heaving turf of the Elegist. What- 
ever is lovely and of good report is within the reach 
of his sympathy. He turns from the humour 
of Chaucer to the dreams of Collins j as he feels 
opposite emotions roused and gratified by the Wood- 
man of Gainsborough, and the Saint of Francia. 

In a true Epic, he admires the palace of the Muse. 
Each book is a state-room full of portraits of princes 
and heroes. Long lines of historic ancestors and 
splendid achievements rise to his memory. He reads 
Homer with some of the sentiment with which he 
visits Windsor. Reflective poetry exerts its power 
in a different manner. The palace moulders into 
the cathedral ; tombs replace the ancestral pictures ; 
the cloister is the royal chamber ; and Death 
breathes the kingly consecration of Time. 

Gayer scenes sometimes invite him. Sir Hudibras 
talks Babylonian 3 Gilpin's postchaise takes him up for 



74 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Edmonton ; Pope introduces a Conversation-piece, 
sparkling as Watteau's ; Thomson leads him among 
the ripe fruit, and under the warm shade of the 
garden wall ; or if his mood be idler, he gathers 
a few sonnets, the hedge-flowers of fancy, and 
dreams over a stanza of Parnell and Shenstone. 

The advantages of Poetry are many, as its de- 
lights are common. It makes dark weather fair, 
and blue skies bluer. The dismallest day — a giant 
of clouds — sinks before it. Not only Shakspere 
and Milton bear the sling ; the fatal pebble may 
be taken from a village brook. The insolent 
Philistine, who lords it over a noble spirit, is 
frequently vanquished and plundered by one of a 
ruddy countenance, coming from the country and 
the sheepfold. 

It is worth observing how much our out-of-door 
pleasures are heightened by the poets. Nature, 

" By all her blooms and mingled murmurs dear," 

is brought closer to the heart ; her charms are 
doubled. The fields look greener ; brighter people 
walk among the corn. Wordsworth gilds the forest 
arches with the equipage of Olympus ; Spenser 
touches the mossy roots of old beeches into sunshine 
with the angel face of Una ; Shakspere sprinkles 
moonbeams to 

" Tip with silver all the fruit-tree tops j " 

Southey 

" Mottles with mazy shade the orchard slope ; " 

and Bloomfield gathers the white clouds to rest in the 
evening sky, like a flock of sheep with the shepherd. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 75 

Poetry in general resembles a field-path which the 
whole village may walk upon. Most of its beauties 
are unenclosed. But here and there a choice tree, 
or a fine glimpse of scenery, is shut in. Only a 
learned taste may open the gate and show the grounds. 
Akenside, Collins, Gray, and T. Warton, are ex- 
amples of this kind. The principle of their style is 
twofold; embracing — i. The construction of a 
language differing from that of society ; and 2. The 
decoration and arrangement of it, according to the 
laws of design and colour. The first object is 
sought by blending foreign idioms with those of 
home ; and the second by disposing the thoughts to 
captivate and dazzle the eye. 

It is obvious that the gratification which such 
productions afford lies beyond the sentiment, or the 
description, and is independent of either. A Greek 
or a Latin phrase, suddenly encountered, is like a 
sketch of a ruin or a costume in a traveller's note- 
book. It carries the mind back into the scenery and 
the customs of ancient people. " By these means, " it 
has been elegantly observed, " the genius of the poet, 
instead of leading, seems only to accompany us into 
the regions of his beautiful creations, while the 
activity of the fancy multiplies into a thousand forms 
the image it has received ; and the memory, gather- 
ing up the most distant associations, surrounds the 
poet with a lustre not his own." 

These are the enclosed beauties of Poetry — shel- 
tered garden-beds of curious flowers — not to be 
judged by comparison with the open landscape, but 
to be visited and enjoyed for their own particular 



76 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

charms. There can be no uniformity of excellence. 
Each style of invention — poetic, architectural, artis- 
tic, or musical — has its own laws, and demands a 
trial which shall be based upon them. Marino and 
Cowley would not call Petrarch and Wordsworth as 
witnesses to character. Ariosto demurs to a sum- 
ming up of Quintilian. Julio Romano represents 
the Hours feeding the Horses of the Sun ; Landseer j 
takes his palfrey from the meadow to prance with 
cavalier or lady, in the green array of the olden time. 
What then ? Have we one measure for the most 
poetical and the truest of Painters ? Must the alle- 
goric and the real be thrown into the same scale ? 

Look at the argument in another way. Hang 
Wilkie's tc Rent-Day" and a picture of P. Veronese 
together. We are contrasting an interior in Gold- 
smith's Auburn with Milton's grandest compositions 
from Mythology. In one, the elements of interest 
are few and simple — the old furniture, the weeping 
woman, the hard broker ; nothing speaks to the 
imagination, or the taste : the appeal is to the heart. 
In the other, the materials of impression are many i 
and costly — sculptured columns, sumptuous trains of ! 
servants, the plume and stateliness of war. The : 
heart is untouched ; all strikes the eye, and is 
addressed to it. Bring the beggar from the street, \ 
and he has a pulse and a tear for Wilkie j but call 
the scholar from his prints and statues, to appreciate 
the grace and the dignity of Verona. The accom- 
plished reader tries to unite the feelings of sympathy 
and of taste. He acknowledges each to be a master, 
and admires both if he can. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. JJ 

Hitherto we have been considering those delights 
which Poetry supplies to the mind. But it has 
other attractions. Next to its language is the tone 
of its voice. It makes love to the ear, and wins it 
with music. Certain passages possess a beauty 
altogether unconnected with their meaning. The 
reader is conscious of a strange, dreamy sense of 
enjoyment, as of lying upon warm grass in a June 
evening, while a brook tinkles over stones in the 
glimmer of trees. Sidney records the effect of the 
old ballad on himself; and Spence informs us that 
he never repeated particular lines of delicate modu- 
lation without a shiver in his blood, not to be 
expressed. Boyle was conscious of a tremor at the 
utterance of two verses in Lucan ; and Derham 
knew " one to have a chill about his head," upon 
reading or hearing the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, 
and David's lamentation for Jonathan. How deep 
is the magic of sound may be learned by breaking 
some sweet verses into prose. The operation has 
been compared to gathering dew-drops, which shine 
like jewels upon the flower, but run into water in 
the hand. The elements remain, but the sparkle is 
gone. 

Of all the measures in which Imagination takes 
its pastime, the heroic line of Milton and Shakspere 
is the most rich and changeful. It is full of oppor- 
tunities. Every colour and shade play on its broken 
surface. No gleam of sun is lost. Its broad mirror 
gives space for the magnificence of imagery, and the 
long-drawn pomp of description ; for the snowy 
piles of alabaster, where the chief of the angelic 



78 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

guard kept watch near the Eastern gate of Eden, 
his shield and sword " hung high with diamond 
flaming;" and for the bark of the Egyptian, with its 
silken sails and painted fans, gliding on its own 
shadow of gold along the glassy Cydnus. 

Milton played on his metre like his organ. He 
brings out with a daring finger every grand and 
various note, sometimes — with wonderful effect — 
striking a momentary crash of discord into the full 
swell of the music. He disregards syllables. A 
poet, not unworthy to criticise him, quotes the 
verses in which Death threatens Satan at the gates 
of Hell— 

" Back to thy punishment, 
False fugitive ! and to thy speed add wings, 
Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue 
Thy ling'ring — or with one stroke of this dart 
Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before;" 

and remarks, " The hand of a master is felt through 
every movement of this sentence, especially towards 
the close, where it seems to grapple with the throat 
of the reader ; the hard, staccato stops, that well nigh 
take the breath, in attempting to pronounce c or, 
with one stroke of this dart,' are followed by an 
explosion of sound in the last line like a heavy dis- L 
charge of artillery." 

Shenstone found his ear always pleased by the in- 
troduction of words — like watery — which, consisting ,. 
of two syllables, have the fulness of three. The 
employment of spondees, with the melody of dac- r 
tyls, is another secret of Milton's versification. If i 
Shakspere be studied with equal attention, the ' 
whole power and compass of the English language 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 79 

will be understood. Perhaps it is susceptible or no 
! inflection of harmony, not even the low thrill of the 
flageolet, which is not brought out in the passionate 
I or familiar tones of its imperial Master. 

The rhyming couplet may claim the second 
I rank. Dryden took the tinkle from the chime, 
I by his artful and various pauses. At once ma- 
I jestic and easy, with the warble of the flute and 
j the trumpet-peal, he fills and entrances the ear. 
I The mellifluence of Pope, as Johnson called it, has 
! the defect of monotony. Exquisite in the sweet 
I rising and falling of its clauses, it seldom or never 
takes the ear prisoner by a musical surprise. If 
Pope be the nightingale of our verse, he displays 
none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the 
songster. He has no variations. The tune is deli- 
cate, but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all 
over brilliant, which pipes its one lay in a golden 
cage, and has forgotten the green wood in the luxury 
of confinement. But Dryden's versification has the 
freedom and the freshness of the fields. Running: 
through his noblest harmonies, we catch, at inter- 
vals, that rude sweetness of a Scottish air which he 
himself heard in Chaucer. This is a great charm. 
He preserved the simple, unpremeditated graces of 
the earlier couplet, its confluence and monosyllabic 
close, while he added a dignity and a splendour un- 
known before. Pope's modulation is of the ear ; 
Dryden's of the subject. He has a different tone for 
Iphigenia slumbering under trees, by the fountain 
side ; for the startled knight, who listens to strange 
sounds within the glooms of the wood ; and for 



80 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

the courtly Beauty to whom he wafted a com- 
pliment. 

The stanza, to which Spenser has given a 
name, combines the advantages of the blank verse 
with the graces of the rhymed. Dryden confessed 
his obligations to a concord of sounds for helping 
him to a thought, and some of the most elaborate 
delineations of Spenser appear to have grown out of 
the necessities of his metre. Warton instances the 
binding of Furor by Guyon : — 

" With hundred iron chains he did him bind, 

And hundred knots, which did him sore constrain j 

Yet his great iron teeth he still did grind, 

And grimly gnash, threatening revenge in vain : 

His burning eyes, ivhom bloody streaks did stain, 

Stared full <wide } and threw forth sparks of fire ; 

And more for rank despight, than for great pain, 

Sbakt bis long locks coloured like copper wire, 

And bit his tawny beard to show his raging ire." 

But for the tyranny of rhyme, we might have 
wanted the vivid circumstances of the fifth, sixth, 
and eighth lines. The stanza, in Spenser's hand, is 
equal to any Rembrandt-effect of shadow, or fear. 
Never did the armour of a knight strike more glit- 
tering rays into the dark, or a red thunderbolt tear 
up the ground with a fiercer plunge, than in his 
verse. But its nature is gentler and more sunny. 
Its home is on the lips of love, when May throws 
flowers from her lap, or with the dreaming En- 
chantress, whose warm tresses are sprinkled by 
ambrosia j 

u on either hand upswells 
The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest." 

Then all the hidden melody of its soul comes forth. 
Listen to the description of the abode of Sleep : — 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. &I 

" And more to lull him in his slumbers soft, 

A trickling stream from high rocks tumbling downe, 
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft, 
Mixed with a murmuring wind much like the sowne 
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne : 
No other noise, nor people's troublous cries 
As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne, 
Might there be heard ; but careless Quiet lies, 
Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies." 

A writer, who has thrown many pleasant lights 
upon poetry, reminds us that in reading this stanza 
we ought to humour it with a corresponding tone of 
voice, lowering or deepening it, " as though we were 
going to bed ourselves, or thinking of the rainy 
night that had lulled us." He suggests that atten- 
tion to the accent and pause in the last line will 
make us feel the depth and distance of the scene. 
This sense of remote loneliness forms a delightful 
peculiarity of Spenser at all seasons. A thousand 
miles of dark trees seem to rustle between the world 
and the poet. Mr. Coleridge points out the ima- 
ginative absence of space and time in the Faery 
^ueen. The haunted region has no boundary — the 
reader goes with the poet, as the Waking Beauty 
followed the conquering Prince : — 

" Across the hills and far away 

Beyond their utmost purple rim, 
And deep into the dying day." 

His eyes are in a trance, delicious as that which 
held the maid, the page, and the peacock, when a 
sudden breeze swept through the garden, and all the 
clocks of that marvellous house struck together. 
He is in Dreamland, without the wish or the power 
to ask, or to learn, how he came, or when he is to 
depart. If a faint murmur from the dim world of 

G 



82 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

life break on the calm, some sweet symphony of 
the silver-sounding instruments soon renews the 
spell — 

" A most melodious sound 
Of all that might delight a dainty ear, 
Such as, at once, might not on living ground, 
Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere." 

The picturesque of versification shares the incon- 
veniences of the picturesque in building ; dark 
windows and winding galleries perplex the footstep ; 
obscure similes and intricate epithets entangle the 
attention. The defects of the Spenserian stanza 
are classed under three heads : (i.) Dilation of cir- 
cumstances, however insignificant; (2.) Repetition 
of words; (3.) The introduction of puerile or un- 
becoming thoughts to complete the rhyme. For the 
most part the skill of the poet overcomes the dif- 
ficulties. His nimble hand ranges over the keys 
and brings the harshest notes into concord. Oc- 
casionally, however, lines are rebellious. A stanza 
turns upon him, but he encounters it with a resolu- 
tion which reminded an ingenious critic, of Hercules 
breaking the back of the Nemean lion. He dislo- 
cates the tender nerves of a metaphor with a merci- 
less grasp ; alters, lengthens, or cuts away words 
and letters. Language is his kingdom, and he rules 
it like a despot. 

After every abatement, the stanza itself remains 
unequalled for breadth, richness, and sound. It is 
marked, moreover, by a romantic wildness, which 
is singularly appropriate to the visionary temper of 
the poem. The lingering, dying fall of the closing 
Alexandrine suits well the antique style, and the 



83 

serious light of the verse. As the music rolls down 
the shadowy canto, which the cloud of allegory and 
the beams of fancy fill with a balmy twilight, we 
recall to our memory the anthem in a gorgeous 
chapel, when it sweeps along the branching roof, 
and trembles round the decorated pinnacles, and 
sighs among the glimmering stone-work and the 
fading canopies, until every pillar and leaf are 

" Kissed 
By sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife." 

It would be like reckoning up the notes of the 
wood in spring, to dwell upon the pleasures afforded 
to the ear by that linked sweetness, which gives the 
title of "lyrical" to the dancing numbers of Cowley, 
and the buoyant Masques of Milton and Jonson ; 
while the laboured efforts of their genius are honoured 
and surveyed, the gayer language of fancy is ever on 
the tongue. Paradise Lost is laid up in cedar ; but 
& Allegro is a household word. 

It was a saying of Shenstone, and experience con- 
firms it, that the lines of poetry, the periods of prose, 
and even the texts of Scripture most frequently re- 
collected and quoted, are those which are felt to be 
pre-eminently musical. The simplest rhythm is 
the softest, and the most familiar is the dearest. 
New forms disturb the ear by disappointing it. Per- 
haps the innovations of Horace may help to explain 
the neglect of him which the discoveries of Pompeii 
suggest. Collins has not rendered the unrhymed 
ode popular. Southey pays in reputation for the 
difficulty of his tunes. Whatever changes be rung 
upon bells, they ought to be chimes. The com- 



84 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

positions, to which we return with aftectionate 
frequency, owe their interest to the cadence scarcely 
less than to their imagery. Take the following 
specimen, which has the warble and the pathos or 
the nightingale : — 

Youth and Age. 

u Flowers are lovely; Love is flower-like ; 
Friendship is a sheltering tree ; 
Oh, the joys that came down shower-like, 
Of Friendship, Love, and Liberty, 
Ere I was old ! 
Ere I was old ! Ah, woeful Ere ! 
Which tells me, Youth's no longer here ! 

Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 
Tis known that thou and I were onej 

I'll think it but a fond conceit- 
It cannot be that Thou art gone ! 
The vesper bell hath not yet tolled, 
And thou wert aye a masker bold ! 
What strange disguise hast now put on, 
To make believe that thou art gone ? 

1 see these locks in silvery slips, 

This drooping gait, this altered size : 
But spring-tide blossoms on thy lips, 

And tears take sunshine from thine eyes. 
Life is but thought ; so think I will, 
That Youth and I are house-mates still." 



XVI. — Satire excluded from Poetry. 

The Satirist is only related to the Poet when he j 
beautifies the exhibition of real life with the lights of I 
fancy, and ennobles invective into allegory ; when 
he puts the crown upon some martyr of Learning, 
or immortalizes a moral malefactor in fire. But as 
the mere outburst of passion, disappointment, or 
rivalry, Satire is banished from the family of Song. 
Literature loves the good-will and peace she teaches. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 85 

Quarrels in verse or in prose, never gain her pro- 
tection. The abuse of Churchill melts with the 
winter snow. Even the mightiest word-combatants 
draw few eyes to the story of their struggles ; and the 
fierce controversy of Milton has left no deeper traces 
behind it, than the feet of a Greek wrestler upon the 
dust of the arena. 

Viewed in its happiest form, as a work of art, 
Satire has one defect which seems to be incurable — 
its uniformity of censure. Bitterness scarcely admits 
those fine transitions, which make the harmony of a 
composition. Aquafortis bites a plate all over alike. 
The satirist is met by the difficulty of the etcher. 
But he wants his opportunities of conquering it. 
The graver may lend emphasis to the needle. The 
angry pen has no ally. The necessary balance of 
effect can only be given by a different hand. A 
satire should be interpolated by a philosopher, and the 
gnomic wisdom of Jackson be stamped upon Pope. 



XVII. — The Drama, its Character and 
Entertainment. 

Dryden. defined a play to be a just and lively image 
of human nature, representing its passions and hu- 
mours, and the changes of fortune to which it is 
subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind. 
Hurd expands the view. Man is so constructed, 
that whatever his condition may be — whether plea- 
surable or painful — the imagination continually pre- 
sents to the mind numberless varieties of pictures 



86 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

conformable to his situation. These images are 
shaped and tinged by the circumstances of birth, 
feeling, and employment. The exhibition of them 
is the Poetry, and a just representation is the Art ot 
dramatic writing. Supposing this outline to be ear- 
nestly filled up, the Stage would become a school of 
virtue, and Tragedy, in the words of Percy, be a 
supplement to the Pulpit. 

And this, according to his light, was the character 
of the Greek dramatist. He instructed and enter- 
tained. His page was solemnized by wisdom. It 
was such a style that Milton included among the 
evening amusements of his Thoughtful Man : 

" Sometimes let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sceptred pall come sweeping by, 
Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, 
Or the tale of Troy divine $ 
Or what — though rare— of later age 
Ennobled hath the buskin" d stage.'"'' 

The choice of subject, not more than its treat- 
ment, gave an educational tone to old Tragedy. The 
writer selected the grandest features of national story. 
It is found that a spectator is affected by the rank 
and remoteness of the sufferer. Belisarius asking 
an obolus is more touching than a blind sailor who 
lost his sight before the mast. Hurd puts this 
feeling with force : " The fall of a cottage by the 
accidents of time and weather is almost unheeded, 
whilst the ruins of a tower, which the neighbourhood 
hath gazed at for ages with admiration, strike all 
observers with concern. " And our own Shakspere 
never charms us with so mighty a wand, as in his 
portraits from history — 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 87 

" When mid his bold design, 
Before the Scot, afflicted and aghast, 

The shadowy kings of Banquo's fated line 
Through the dark cave in gleamy pageant passed." 

The Drama is the book of the people. In all 
countries the circumstances of a life, however rudely 
displayed, possess an incomparable attraction. The 
story-teller is the play-wright of Constantinople. 
The adventures of an ancient Javanese prince will 
hold a native assembly from evening until daylight. 
Yet the properties consist only of a transparent 
screen, with a large lamp behind it, and a hundred 
painted puppets, twelve inches high, cut out of buf- 
falo-hide. The poetry is a monotonous recitative, 
and the action is confined to throwing the shadow of 
each successive figure upon the curtain. 

A dramatic poet wields the sceptre of the masses ; 
he reaches the national heart through all its organs 
of sensation. Eye and ear are his ministers. A 
brave exploit is riveted in the audience. A fine say- 
ing grows into an argument. When a moral pur- 
pose animates the author, he works it through the 
play. The commonest burlesque submits to the 
oversight of conscience. 

The Drama embraces and applies all the beauties 
and decorations of Poetry. The sister arts attend 
and adorn it. Spenser's lovely portraiture of Venus 
finding Diana in the wood — 

"While all her nymphs did, like a garland^ her enclose," 

is vividly descriptive of the honours and services 
which are rendered to the Muse of Tragedy. 
Painting, Architecture, and Music, are her hand- 
maids. The costliest lights of a people's intellect 



88 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

burn at her Show. All ages welcome her. An 
eloquent admirer has indicated this universal in- 
fluence. He points to the king, the statesman, and 
the soldier, gathered before her to watch the anatomy 
of the passions ; to the artist, combining the splen- 
dour of costume and variety of characters into 
gorgeous processions of his own ; to the old, living 
over early days in recollection ; and to the young, 
waiting with eager eyes and beating hearts for the first 
rustle of the curtain, which is to discover, after each 
rising fold, a new world of scenery, magnificence, 
and life. 

The Preacher tells us that laughter is mad, and 
the Proverb of the Wise Man adds a warning 
that the end of mirth is heaviness. There was a 
deep moral in the Athenian law which interdicted 
a judge of the Areopagus from writing a comedy. 
The habit of looking at things on the ludicrous side 
is always hurtful to the moral feelings. The plea- 
sure is faint and vanishing, and leaves behind it an 
apprehension of disgrace. RafFaelle and Hogarth, 
Comus and the Tale of a Tub, are cut asunder by a 
broad gulf. " It is not good to live in jest, since we 
must die in earnest." 

No other element of literature is so susceptible 
and volatile as Wit. It comes in and goes out 
with the moon ; when most flourishing, it has its 
boundaries, from which, as Swift said, it may not 
wander, upon peril of being lost. This geographical 
chain has bound, with heavier or slighter links, the 
pleasantry of Lucian, the buffoonery of Rabelais, the 
pictures of Dryden, and the caricatures of Butler. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 89 

The urbane gaiety of Horace alone preserves its 
! freedom, and travels over the world. 

Humour, which is the pensiveness of Wit, enjoys 
I a longer and a wider life. After one brilliant ex- 
plosion, the repartee is worthless. The shrunken 
I firework offends the eye ; but the quiet suggestive- 
! ness of Mr. Shandy is interesting as ever ; and the 
: details of the great army in Flanders will last as 
j long as the passage of Hannibal. Collins seems to 
J indicate the poetical expression of Humour, as d ; s- 
! tinguished from the broader and coarser mirth : — 

" But who is he whom now she views, 
In robe of wild contending hues? 
Thou by the Passions nursed, I greet 
The comic sock that binds thy feet! 
O Humour, thou whose name is known 
To Britain's favoured isle alone j 
Me, too, amidst thy band admit; 
There where the young-eyed healthful Wit, 
(Whose jewels in his crisped hair 
Are placed each other's beams to share j 
Whom no delights from thee divide) 
In laughter loosed, attends thy side." 

The pleasure of Shakspere's comedies rises from 
their Humour. His smile is serious. Johnson 
commended tragi-comedy, as giving a true reflection 
of those grave and trifling incidents which compose 
the scenes of experience. Joy and grief are never 
far apart. In the same street the shutters of one 
house are closed, while the curtains of the next are 
brushed by shadows of the dance. A wedding- 
party returns from church, and a funeral winds to its 
door. The smiles and the sadnesses of life are the 
tragi-comedy of Shakspere. Gladness and sighs 
brighten and dim the mirror he beholds. In this 
respect he differs from his contemporary, Ben 



0,0 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Jonson, in whom is enjoyed, in its richness, the 
comedy of erudition. The Alchemist, the Silent 
Woman, and Every Man in his Humour, are master- 
pieces of a learned pencil. Fletcher may be relished 
in his Elder Brother, and Massinger in his incom- 
parable Sir Giles Overreach. 

If the reader descends from the reigns of Elizabeth 
and James into the time of the second Charles, his 
gratifications of mirth are purchased by a wounded 
conscience. Comedy has no whole place in its 
body. Greek farce was riotous and insolent ; yet 
fancy — like a summer breeze from a green farm — 
sometimes refreshes the hot stage. Aristophanes 
paints town-life with a suburb of gardens. But a 
blade of grass never grew in the theatre of Farquhar 
and his kindred. Wide was their scholarship in 
wit :— 

•* They sauntered Europe round, 
And gathered every vice on Christian ground." 

They cast nets over the old world and the new. 
No venomous epigram, or sparkling idiom of sin, 
escaped the throw. Every line glitters and stings. 
Upon the whole, the pleasures of the drama — tragic 
and cornic — are larger than its advantages. In the 
bold figure of Cowley, it must be washed in the 
Jordan to recover its health. A deep purpose of i 
religion alone can make it useful to the people. | 
Taste may purify it, but the disease continues. It 
is only the water of Damascus to the leper. Of 
English poets belonging to our golden age, Shakspere: 
has the fewest scales. His vigour of constitution 
threw off the ranker disease. With Fletcher's 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 9 1 

vice and Decker's coarseness, he would have been 
the fearfullest spectacle the world has beheld of 
Genius retaining its power, and bereft of its light ; 
and the Temple of our Poetry, bowed by his sacri- 
legious arms, might have remained a monument of 
supernatural strength, and sightless despair. 



XVIII. — The Delights and Consolations of 
Poetry. 

Neither poet nor reader may reckon on the good 
fortune of Metastasio, who gained a suit at Naples 
by some extempore stanzas. A friend invited the 
judge to her house, the poet pleaded in rhyme, and 
in two or three days the Court decided in his favour. 
Future invaders of India will scarcely imitate Alex- 
ander, walking — in the lively extravagance of Dave- 
nant — after the drum from Macedon, with Homer 
in his pocket ; and Utopia must be erected among 
the Affghans, before a captive regains his freedom 
by a few verses of an English Euripides. 

Poetry is its own reward. A consoler in life, it 
soothes afflictions ; crowns poverty ; rocks asleep 
sickness ; multiplies and refines pleasures ; endears 
! loneliness ; embellishes the common, and irradiates 
the lovely. It is the natural religion of Literature. 
Lord Bacon explained the old superstition that a 
rainbow draws perfume from the ground it hangs 
over, by supposing it to absorb the bloom of flowers. 
The dream of science is a reality of song. That 



92 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Bow, which Fancy sets in the clouds of life, drinks 
fragrance from all its many-coloured joys and sor- 
rows. The hues which it gathers, it restores with 
milder beauty. The barrenest way-side of want 
and mourning looks green and cheerful under its 
brooding line of shadow. 

Poetical taste is the only magician whose wand 
is not broken. No hand, except its own, can dis- 
solve the fabric of beauty in which it dwells. Genii, 
unknown to Arabian fable, wait at the portal. 
Whatever is most precious from the loom, or the 
mine of fancy, is poured at its feet. Love, purified 
by contemplation, visits and cheers it. Unseen 
musicians are heard in the dark. It is Psyche in 
the palace of Cupid. 

True Poetry, sincerely cherished, is a friend for 
life. It accompanies us to all lands, and enjoys 
health in every climate. Milton disembarks with 
the Missionary in the Bay of Islands. The African 
waggon is a litter for Horace. He who loves Ima- 
gination and Pathos wears a ring upon his finger, 
not less precious than that which Pliny tells us be- 
longed to Pyrrhus, in which Nature had produced 
the figure of Apollo and the nine Muses. The stone 
answers the wish. Some happy messenger 

" Of many a coloured plume sprinkled with gold" 

comes to our call. The scene is changed. The 
street of a great city slopes into a glade of Arcadia; 
an Italian moon hangs large and glorious between 
the mountain pines ; the shops brighten into gay 
pavilions, and the trumpet of the tournament rings 
out its challenge ; a magnificent kingdom of the 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 93 

|East flashes through the smoke with all its pinnacles ; 
|or a Tyrian sail catches the evening light, and swells 
:softly in the still air of time. 

What harmony and lustre such visions shed over 
the tumult and fever of our cares ! And he who 
jseeks, finds them: — 

"In spite of all, 
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall 
From our dark spirits." 

The history of a great statesman exemplifies the 
poetical enchantment. Pitt sometimes escaped from 
the roar of contending parties at home and abroad, 
into the solemn retirements of a favourite author. 
He left the political elements to fight outside, and 
barred the gates of Imagination upon the storm. 
One visitor found him reading Milton aloud, with 
strong emphasis, and so deeply engaged in Paradise, 
as to have forgotten the presence of any people in 
the world except Adam and Eve. Compare with 
this happy portrait the confession of Sir Robert 
Walpole to Mr. Fox, in the library at Houghton — 
f I wish I took as much delight in reading as you 
do : it would be the means of alleviating many 
tedious hours in my present retirement ; but, to my 
misfortune, I derive no pleasure from such pursuits." 

Of course the finest taste has the richest enjoy- 
ment, and catches in, in all its dewy lustre, 

'* The landscape gliding swift 
Athwart Imagination's vivid eye." 

But in whatever degree the poetical feeling may 
have been cultivated, the reward and the pleasure 
will be insured. The Muse's stone has a homely 



94 ' PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

magic. The humblest appeal is never rejected. 
The farmer, who has treasured a few lines of rural 
description, may bind the sheaves upon his bed of 
sickness ; the rose and the woodbine will trail their 
clusters down the wall, and the broken light through 
the curtains be changed into the tremulous glimmer 
of elms on the village-green. Even the old squire, 
no longer startling the woods with his horn, may 
enjoy a quiet chase in metre, clear a hedge upon a 
swift hexameter, and in pursuit of the u brush," 
which was the pride and crown of his manhood, — 

" Still scour the county in his elbow-chair." 

How, in all times, have the Muse's enchantments 
been worked ! O Queen of Wonders, what tears 
hast thou dried ! What spirits hast thou sent to the 
gifted in their sorrows, touching the mourner with a 
silver wand, and wafting him into Elysium ! We 
think of Milton, after the sight of his eyes had gone 
from him, when the rays of early studies shone 
across his path ; when the voices he loved in youth 
— solemn notes of tragic, or livelier numbers of lyric 
verse — stole into his ear out of the gloom -, and 
nightingales sang as sweetly in Cripplegate, as when 
the April leaf trembled in his father's garden. 

We remember Camoens in all his trials ; whether 
gazing on land and water from that rocky chair 
built by Nature for him — and still called by his 
name — upon an isthmus of the China seas; ship- 
wrecked, with his Lusiad held above the waves, and 
drifting upon a plank to shore j in Lisbon, waiting 
in solitude and darkness the return of a black ser- 
vant, who helped to feed his hunger with the alms 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 95 

he begged ; or closing his eyes — a sick mendicant 
and outcast — in a public hospital. 

We follow Dante, homeless and destitute, with a 
sentence of flames hanging over his head ; a wan- 
derer from city to city in search of rest, having no 
companion of his trials except the seven cantos of his 
poem, which he had written before his banishment 
from Florence ; finding in it his consolation, and 
ever adding a stone to the fabric, as the storm that 
beat on him through life cleared away into short in- 
tervals of sunshine. We weep with Tasso, in the 
Hospital of St. Anna, scared by the screams of ma- 
niacs in the neighbouring cells, yet sometimes turn- 
ing his thoughts to the correction of his Eastern 
Story, and peopling the loneliness with the magnificent 
tumult of a Crusade. 

What upheld the buffeted Pilgrims of Fame in 
their struggle and journey ? Doubtless they felt, in 
all its fever, that passion for renown which the 
noblest of the four called — 

!"The spur which the clear spirit doth raise, 
To scorn delight, and live laborious days." 

But they had other and nearer joys. An ani- 
mating, mastering sense of music lived in their 
•hearts, finding utterance in tones more lulling than 
the south-west wind of the Arcadia, which, in the 
ear of Sidney, crept " over flowery fields and sha- 
dowed waters in the heat of summer." Happy eyes 
that make pictures when they are shut ! The fra- 
grant shades of a visionary world enclosed their 
melody, as thick leaves bury the singing birds when 
lightnings are abroad. However wintry the path 



96 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

might be, they knew of sunny banks and gardens, 
where the violets were always blowing, and lutes 
being touched by radiant ringers. 

They were conscious of the Muse's presence in 
sudden streams of bloom and lustre upon the air. 
Even the strokes of hatred and persecution lost their 
power, or dropped with a blunted edge. For 
Homer's Goddess, warding off the dart from her fa- 
vourite, is ever an allegory of the Poet on the battle- 
field of the world, where Beauty — his mind's mother 
— throws forward her bright garment, and intercepts 
the arrow from the enemy's bow. 

And thus it happens that the poet, rich irj his 
poverty, carries with him sweet grapes to quench 
his thirst, and greenest branches to shelter his re- 
pose. The stormy day is better for him than the 
calm. We are told by Naturalists that birds of 
Paradise fly best against the wind ; it drifts behind 
them the gorgeous train of feathers, which only en- 
tangles their flight with the gale. Pure Imagination, 
of which the loveliest of winged creatures is the 
fitting emblem, seems always to gain in vigour and 
grace by the tempests it encounters, and in contrary 
winds to show the brightest plumage. 

It is a happy feature of English teaching that the. 
child is fed so largely with poetical fruit. A love of 
the good and the beautiful is thus entwined with the 
growing mind, and becomes a part of it. Sometimes 
the muscular ivy does not clasp the oak with a j 
stronger embrace. A remembered verse is pleasing for 
its own sake, and for the associations which it revives. , 
When Sir Joshua Reynolds, with other English 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 97 

j visitors to the Opera in Venice, heard a ballad which 
• was played in every street of London before they left 
jit, the tears rushed to their eyes, and home, with all 
•its endearments and friends, rose before them. 

" Such is the secret union, when we feel 
A song — a flower —a name — at once restore 
The attention." 

I Most affectingly has a living historian expressed the 

| feeling of unnumbered hearts ; — " They who have 

I known what it is when afar from books, in solitude, 

' or in travelling, or in intervals of worldly care, to 

feed on poetical recollections, to recall the sentiments 

and images which retain by association the charm 

that early years once gave them — they will feel the 

inestimable value of committing to the memory, in 

the prime of its power, what it will easily receive 

1 and indelibly retain." 

Nor if the gathering of flowers sometimes awake 
an ambition to grow them — if the reader, smitten 
with love of an ode, set himself to produce one — is 
the injury to his own mind, or the inconvenience to 
his friends, likely to be of particular moment. He 
may mistake his calling and his powers — may be- 
lieve himself born to write, instead of to judge -, but 
next to excellence is the desire of it. A poem that 
bloomed through the little day of domestic reputa- 
tion, often blends itself healthfully with the atmo- 
sphere of home ; as the rose, after its leaves are 
strewed on the ground, mingles its odours with the 
air, and continues a purifying work when its colour 
has departed. 

Poetry is born to be the companion of youth. 

H 



98 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Those hours may be fleeting as they are fair. The 
flower of the grass is not withered sooner. Tempta- 
tions and cares overleap the garden. A blazing 
sword appears at the gate. The hard paths of toil 
are to be trodden; the soil of life is to be tilled. 
But why should Manhood and Poetry no longer 
take sweet counsel together, and walk through the 
world as friends ? Age, with its bereavements and 
compensations, will endear them more and more to 
each other. Do not take away a companion that 
dries the tear, and a voice that sings in the night. 
Whatever ills befall them by the way, let Youth and 
Fancy go out of Paradise hand-in-hand. 



XIX. — Fiction : The Romance and the 
Novel. 

A poem, unfettered by metre and rhythm, takes the 
name of Romance. The genealogy of fiction fur- 
nishes another proof of the diffusion of mental 
pleasures. The same stories appear with an altered , 
complexion. The cat of Whittington made the [ 
fortune of a merchant of Genoa, as well as of a lord p 
mayor of London. Llywellin's greyhound has a n 
second grave very distant from that of Bethgelert. B 
It sleeps and points a moral in Persia. Dear Red J 
Riding Hood puts off her cloak by a Danish fireside. 
The dart of Abaris, which carried the philosopher 
whithersoever he desired it, gratifies later enthusiasts 
in travel, as the Cap of Fortunatus and the space- 
compelling boots of the nursery hero. The helmet 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 99 

of Pluto, which protected Perseus in his desperate 
combat with Medusa, has frequently shielded 
humbler heads as the Fog-cap of the north ; while 
the ring of Gyges transferred its advantages of 
secresy to the mask of Arthur. 

For practical purposes, Prose-fiction may be 
divided into two kinds : (i) the Romance, which is 
the legend of heroic ; and (2) the Novel, which is 
the news of common life. The Romance flourishes 
in the ignorance, the Novel in the refinement of a 
nation. The fourteenth century asked for exploits 
of Charlemagne ; the nineteenth, how the Duke of 
Fair-light dines. The same feeling may still be 
traced in the contrasts of barbarism and civilization. 
The wild Arab by his watch-fire, listens out the 
night to the music of spears in the fierce foray ; the 
Japanese gentleman, mooring his splendid boat 
under a tree, hears his fashionable tale from the 
story-teller, who collects the gossip of his neigh- 
bourhood. 

With ourselves Fiction is only one of the count- 
less pleasures by which curiosity is amused. But to 
remoter students it presented the collected charms 
of literature. We can hardly realize the fascinations 
of Romance in ages, when ability to read a book 
was a rarer accomplishment than the writing of it 
'would be at present. A Gothic story, before the 
press vulgarized wonders, was a treasure to be cata- 
logued with the statutes of the realm. The will of 
a Scottish baronet, in 1390, includes both in the 
pame bequest. Such a book was the pride of the eyes : 

"Princes and kings received the wondrous gift, 
And ladies read the work they could not lift." 



100 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

The scribe, the artist, and the binder, lavished 
their time and skill. Six years were not unfre- 
quently spent upon the internal decorations. The 
margin, in the place of canvas, was enriched with 
portraits, magnificent dresses, flowers, and fruits. 
Letters of silver shone on a purple ground. Golden 
roses studded a covering of crimson velvet ; and 
clasps of precioug metal, richly chased, shut up the 
adventurous knights and the radiant damsels in their 
splendid home. Wonderful were the doings within ! 
Crabbe has playfully unfolded some of them in 
harmonious verse : — 

" Hark! hollow blasts through empty courts resound, 
And shadowy forms with staring eyes stalk round j 
See ! moats and bridges, walls and castles rise, 
Ghosts, fairies, demons, dance before our eyes j 
Lo ! magic verse inscribed on golden gate, 
And bloody hand that beckons on to fate. 
' And who art thou, thou little page unfold ? 
Say, doth thy lord my Claribel withhold? 
Go, tell him straight — Sir Knight, thou must resign 
The captive Queen : for Claribel is mine.' 
Away he flies ; and now for bloody deeds, 
Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds } 
The Giant falls j his recreant throat I seize, 
And from his corslet take the massy keys." 

The Knight and Lady of high degree did no' 
keep these worthies to themselves. Over their 
ample pages, poetical eyes in the sixteenth and sevenn 
teenth centuries pored with untiring satisfaction.; 
Southey discovered in the Amadis of Gaul the Zel-j 
mane of the Arcadia, the Masque of Cupid of the^ 
Faery ®>ueen, and the Florizel of the Winter^ 
Tale. 

The Romance of chivalry replaced the Heroic ir. 
a reduced and feeble copy. It was the incredible" 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 101 

in water-colours. We miss the giants and the en- 
chanters with their enormous capacities. Things that 
never could be done, are, indeed, accomplished in 
every page ; but the actors look diminutive and tame. 
They want the dauntless vivacity of their predeces- 
sors. The epic of falsehood was closed. 

Years passed by, and Fiction put on another 
shape, and received the name, without the inherit- 
ance, of Minerva. Mediaeval exaggerations were 
clothed in modern dresses. Giants, living in im- 
pregnable castles, gave way to heroes of praeterna- 
tural stature in their sentiments, who raved through 
four volumes — sometimes five — for dark ladies of 
impossible beauty. What a geography was theirs ! 
Puck found himself out-run. The chronicler of the 
sayings and doings of the Black Penitents put a 
girdle round the world, in considerably less than 
forty minutes. Time and space were mere circum- 
stances. Kingdoms fraternized. Constantinople 
abutted on Moorflelds ; and Julius Caesar conquered 
Mexico with Cortes. Probability was despised. 
Everything came to pass when it was wanted ; and 
the healthiest people died the moment they were in 
the way. 

The incidents of these tales resembled drop- 
curtains in small theatres. The effect was terrible. 
The Vicar's daughter, watching a fine sunset from 
the churchyard, was ruthlessly carried ofF by banditti, 
who stepped out of a Salvator on purpose. Perhaps 
the scene was laid in a mountain-country, and then, 
about the middle of the first volume, a sentimental 
youth was entranced, during a moonlight walk, by 



102 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

unearthly strains of music proceeding from a lady 
n white muslin, who stood with her harp upon a 
pinnacle of frozen snow, where the wild goat, in 
these prosaic days, would not find a footing. These 
extravagances melted before the dazzling creations 
of Scott, and a fourth class of Fiction delighted the 
world. 

I am not competent to speak of later styles and 
performances, and will not venture to say whether 
the irony of Cowper be applicable to our own 
days : — 

" And novels — witness every month's Review, — 
Belie their name, and offer nothing new." 

But the hastiest observer cannot fail to mark that 
in gay, as in graver efforts, our century is the era of 
revised editions. Richardson, Smollett, and their 
contemporaries, come out in clever abridgments, 
adapted to the changes of taste, and under various 
titles. Old friends revisit us with new faces. Amelia j 
has watched the dying embers for a dozen husbands, 
since Fielding left her; and Uncle Toby's mellow' 
tones have startled us down a college staircase, and' 
through the railings of counting-houses in the City. ■ 
Gentlemen and heroines from whom we parted many'^ 
years ago, with slight respect for their attainments!' 
and morals, have now taken a scientific, or a serious^ 
turn. Lovelace is absorbed in entomology ; and^ 
Lady Bellaston is a rubber of brasses. 

In considering the objects of Prose fiction, I am 
led to think it most useful, as it is most poetical.: 
The grandest outlines of character afford the health-.^ 
fullest examples. On this account, heroic and chi-i. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IO3 

valrous legends have peculiar advantages. Their 
colossal virtues are links between the human and a 
higher organization. They show a sort of middle 
life. Imagination presenting to the mind ideal forms 
of beauty and courage, is a faint shadow of Faith, by 
which the unseen things of another existence are 
brought in later years before us. An ennobling ele- 
ment of thought is wanted ; and a reflective observer 
predicted a deficiency of generous, brave, and devout 
feelings in the manhood of a person, in whose youth 
he discovered a severe restriction of the mind to bare 
truth and minute accuracy, with dislike of the fanci- 
ful, the tender, and the magnificent. Johnson 
seems to have held the same opinion. Writing to 
Mrs. Thrale about the education of her daughter, he 
said : — " She will go back to her arithmetic again, — 
a science suited to Sophy's cast of mind ; for you 
told me in the last winter that she loved metaphysics 
more than romances. Her choice is certainly laud- 
able, as it is uncommon ; but / would have her like 
what is good in both" If life be a curious web, 
which each man and woman are obliged to weave, 
why should not a thread of gold run through the 
woof ? There is a better quality even than prudence. 
We meet people every day who think themselves 
wise because they are selfish. Cut a leaf from a 
ledger, and you have their life. 

The importance of the Romantic element does 
not rest upon conjecture. Pleasing testimonies 
abound. Hannah More traced her earliest impres- 
sions of virtue to works of fiction ; and Adam Clarke 
gives a list of tales that won his boyish admiration. 



104 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Books of entertainment led him to believe in a spi- 
ritual world ; and he felt sure of having been a 
coward, but for romances. He declared that he 
had learned more of his duty to God, his neighbour, 
and himself, from Robinson Crusoe^ than from all the 
books — except the Bible — that were known to his 
youth. These grateful recollections never forsook 
him, and the story of De Foe was put into the hands 
of his children as soon as they were able to read it. 
Sir Alexander Ball informed Coleridge that he 
was drawn to the Navy, in childhood, by the 
pictures which this Ancient Mariner left on his 
mind. 

It would be an idle endeavour to answer all the 
objections which have been urged against Fiction. 
But on one of the perils most earnestly deprecated 
— the disregard of harmony between the means and 
the end — a few remarks may be offered. Let me 
take the objector's own case, and put it in stronger; 
colours, after this manner. A young man is in love 
with a lady of higher station, who is not blind to his; 
merits; but her parents talk of settlements, and he< 
has nothing but hope. How is the difficulty to be; 
overcome ? In the easiest way. Twenty years ago, i 
a gentleman came to London from the New Forest,/ 
rejected and desperate. All his affections were! 
shattered. With one wrench he cast off his 1 ' 
country and his attachment together. He sails; 
to India; works hard; gets promoted ; and comes it 
home with two hundred thousand pounds and^ 
a portfolio of tigers. What has he to do with ! 
the story ? Everything. This fortunate adventurer 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IO5 

is the lover's uncle, although nobody knew of 
the relationship. Well ; he has landed at Ports- 
mouth, and is riding leisurely by a dark wood 
to look at a house which is to let, with a small port- 
manteau strapped on his horse. This is the mo- 
ment. Three footpads spring from the trees ; 
robbery and murder seem inevitable, when his 
nephew — the young man who could not get mar- 
ried, and who had been reading Hammond's Elegies 
on a stile — rushes to the rescue. The plunderers 
disappear ; the kinsmen recognize each other ; the 
brave defender receives on the spot a cheque for ten 
thousand pounds, and departs by the night-coach to 
tell the news to Cecilia. Of course, every difficulty 
vanishes ; the marriage is solemnized, and the last 
chapter ends in a peal. 

Now, suppose this adventure, in all its absurdity, 
to be really written and read, who is likely to be in- 
jured by it? Is it worth a moralist's trouble to work 
himself into a frenzy, and say that his " indignation 
is excited at the immoral tendency of such lessons 
to young readers, who are thus taught to undervalue 
and reject all sober, regular plans for compassing an 
object, and to muse on improbabilities, till they 
become foolish enough to expect them ? " 

In the first place, it may be denied that one 
young man in a million ever built his hopes of pro- 
sperity or love, upon recollections of visionary re- 
latives in Benares. Even real uncles are forgotten 
when they never return. And, secondly, it is not 
to be assumed that the remote contingencies of life 
ought to be always rejected as hurtful. Good 



106 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

fortune is an useful delusion. The improbabilities 
of experience are many, the impossibilities are few. 
The rich kinsman may not arrive from India to 
make two hearts happy ; but circumstances do fall 
out in a way altogether contrary to expectation ; 
helping friends rise up quite as strangely as ap- 
paritions of Nabobs from the jungle; and the 
dearest chains of affection are sometimes riveted by 
means scarcely less astonishing, and certainly not 
more anticipated, than the magical cheque of the 
dreamer. Instead, therefore, of starting from a ro- 
mantic danger, I am inclined, under proper limita- 
tions, to welcome a moral advantage. It is 
something to keep the spirits up in so long and 
harassing a journey ; and even the pack-horse goes 
better with his bells. 

This conclusion invites me to remember another 
pleasure which Prose Fiction shares with Poetic, in 
withdrawing its readers, for a while, from the dis- 
comforts of their condition. It pours sunlight on 
the dingiest window, and sows a hedge of roses 
round a ruinous dwelling. Sterne justly commended 
it for cheating fear and sorrow of many weary mo- 
ments, and leading the traveller from the hard road 
to stray upon enchanted ground. Naturally, the 
writer himself feels the liveliest power of the spell. 
Rousseau wrote the letters of Julia on small sheets 
of paper, which he folded and read in his walks, with 
as much rapture as if they had been sent to him by 
the post; and Richardson wept for Clementina, as 
for a real sufferer. The reader enjoys the same 
enchantment according to his sensibility. Petrarch 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IC 

was so affected by Boccaccio's story of Griseldis, 
that he wished, as he assured his friend, to get it by 
heart ; and he mentions a scholar who, having un- 
dertaken to read it to a company, was interrupted by 
his tears. 

If we look into biography, we find that the most 
refined and the strongest thinkers — the theologian^ 
the poet, and the metaphysician — have turned a kind 
I eye upon Fiction, which has beguiled the leisure and 
refreshed the toils of Gray and Warburton, of 
Locke and Crabbe. 

One advantage of this kind of literature deserves 
to be specified with particular earnestness. It gives 
instruction in amusement. Addison acknowledged 
that he would rather inform than divert his reader ; 
but he recollected that a man must be familiar with 
| wisdom before he willingly enters on Seneca and 
I Epictetus. Fiction allures him to the severe task 
by a gayer preface. Embellished truths are the illu- 
minated alphabet of larger children. " We endure 
reproofs from our friends in leather jackets," re- 
marked a scholar to the lively lady of Streatham, 
" which we should never support if pronounced by 
our contemporaries in lace and tissue." 

Fiction, like the drama, speaks to our hearts by 
exhibitions. Mr. Allworthy was acting a sermon 
upon charity, when the gentle pressure of the strange 
infant's hand on one of his fingers — seeming to im- 
plore assistance — outpleaded, in a moment, the in- 
dignant proposal of Mrs. Deborah to put it in a 
warm basket — as the night was rainy — and lay it at 
the Churchwarden's door \ Corporal Trim's illustra- 



108 PLEASURES, OUJECTS, AND 

tion of death, by the falling hat in the kitchen, strikes 
the fancy more than a climax of Sherlock ; and the 
Vicar of Wakefield in the prison is a whole library 
of theology made vocal. 

In exact proportion to the facility and the vivid- 
ness of the lesson, must be the oversight of its cha- 
racter. Richardson never sustained so heavy a blow 
as one of the least susceptible of essayists inflicted, 
when reading Pamela on the grass of Primrose Hill, 
and being joined by a friendly damsel, who desired 
to read in company, he confessed, " I could have 
wished it had been any other book." However in- 
geniously the highly-coloured scenes of the classic 
novelists may be defended, the sober judgment will 
never be convinced. To say that they conduct the: 
history to its catastrophe, and have their sting drawn, 
by the moral, is like telling us to live tranquilly over 
a cellar of combustibles, because an engine with 
abundance of water is at the end of the street. 

Sir Walter Scott regarded the vices and follies of 
Fielding's celebrated hero as those which the world:, 
soon teaches to all, and to which society is accus-, 
tomed to show so much forbearance. But it has, 
been well observed, that he neglected to estimate the* 
extent to which that false indulgence may be the} 
effect of an immoral literature, operating through a : 
long course of years upon the individual minds of} 
which society is composed. Men are quickly accli-* 
matized in sin ; and the eye, familiar with disease, is^ 
not offended by a few spots on the page. 

During the early popularity of Smollett and Field- Z 
ing, Johnson contributed some wise suggestions- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IO9 

respecting the employment of Fiction. He advised 
the novelist to display virtue in its ideal beauty, not 
angelical, or improbable — because we only imitate 
what we believe — but the purest and the noblest 
within our reach. This selected character he wished 
to be carried through the various changes and trials 
of life, in order that by its victories and its patience 
— by the afflictions it vanquished or endured — we 
may be taught what to hope and what to perform. 
His concluding sentence is fatal to the greatest names 
in the art: — "Vice should always disgust; nor 
should the graces of gaiety, or the dignity of courage, 
be so united with it as to reconcile it to the mind. 
Whenever it appears it should raise hatred by the 
malignity of its practices, and the meanness of its 
stratagems ; for while it is supported by parts or 
spirit, it will be seldom heartily abhorred." 

Such are some of the pleasures and advantages of 
Fiction. As the Romance, its object is to raise the 
mind by proposing to it for imitation characters of 
purity, courage, and patience ; as the Novel, its 
work is to check and amend the little weaknesses of 
temper, by humbling reflections of them upon the 
mirror of the tale. When Fiction fulfils one or 
other of these duties, it obtains a good report, and 
deserves to be numbered among the aids to education. 
The finer feelings are called forth, and objectionable 
peculiarities are repressed. If this result, in some 
measure at least, be not produced, the amusement is 
vain. Emotions are worthless which do not grow 
into deeds ; and the glass of manners is consulted to 
no purpose, unless the defect which it exhibits be re- 



110 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

moved or weakened. The fruit of Fiction, regarded 
only as a luxury, will always be bitter ; and we may 
expect to find the hard saying confirmed, which ac- 
cused it of enervating the understanding and corrupt- 
ing the heart. 



XX. — History: its Charms and Lessons. 

History presents the pleasantest features of Poetry 
and Fiction ; — the majesty of the Epic ; the moving 
accidents of the Drama ; the surprises and moral 
of the Romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector ; Ro- 
binson Crusoe is not stranger than Croesus ; the 
Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott 
with richer lights of lance and armour, than the Car- 
thaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy. 
Froissart's hero has all the minute painting of 
Richardson's. The poetic element is the life-blood 
of the narrative. The gazette glows into the dramas 
the pen-and-ink scrawl into the portrait. 

History, in its simplest shape, is the account of a 
journey to investigate a country, its inhabitants, or 
one particular character. St. Paul told the Galatians 
that he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter — meaning 
to say, that he visited the Apostle to make himself 
more familiar with his mind and feelings. If 
St. Paul had written all that he saw and heard 
during the fifteen days of his abode, it would have 
been a " history." Of this pure form Hero- 
dotus offers the largest and the best specimens. His 
narrative is generally founded upon his observation. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. Ill 

He surveyed the battle-fields he describes, and keep- 

! ingno regular journal, but relying upon memory and 

! a few notes, he fell into some inaccuracies. For the 

! most part, however, he has the freshness of an eye- 

| witness. His picture of Egypt is a moving pano- 

I rama of the Nile. Into whatever region he travels, 

| he makes the reader a companion ; whether he gazes 

I upon the superb palace of Sais and its lighted hall of 

i odours, the sepulchral Pyramids, or Babylon — even 

I then in her waning splendour — as she rose to the 

' Prophet's eye, " the glory of kingdoms, the beauty 

' of the Chaldees* excellency." The interest of this 

familiar manner is lively and lasting, recalling that 

pleasant garrulity of Commines, which led an old 

French critic to say, that in reading him he seemed 

to be in the company of an honest gentleman who 

fought all his battles over again when the cloth was 

removed. 

The same feeling of reality, in a severer tone, 
pleases us in Thucydides. Recording the troubles 
of Peloponnesus, he is Wellington telling the story 
of the Peninsular War. To the same class, in 
ancient days, belong Sallust and Tacitus -, in modern, 
Guicciardini and Clarendon. 

The second manifestation of History is that of 
Narrative founded on information drawn from others. 
It is Paul's visit to Peter related by Luke ; or, the 
Spanish expedition of Scipio told by Polybius on the 
testimony of Laslius. Our venerable Bede is a 
humbler example. 

History, in its third variety, loses the authority of 
observation. The only eye-sight employed is the 



112 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

critical. State papers replace witnesses. Johnson 
indicated one of the immediate inconveniences of this 
change : — " He who describes what he never saw, 
draws from Fancy. Robertson paints minds, as Sir 
Joshua paints faces in a history-piece." 

History may be considered in three lights — a 
pleasurable, an educational, and a moral: (i) as it 
entertains the fancy ; (2) opens new sources of in- 
struction ; (3) and cheris'hes, or enlarges the feelings 
of virtue. In the first light, its poetical relationship 
is clearly marked. Imagination creates no grander 
episodes than the rise and fall of empires. To watch 
the first smiles and motions of national life in its 
cradle ; to trace the growth, the maturity, and the 
decline of kingdoms ; to observe one side of the 
world brightening in the sun of civilization, while 
the other is vapoury and cold ; to see, in the course 
of years, the flourishing region become dim, and the 
dark country glimmer into warmth ; Athens ascend- 
ing into daylight, and Egypt sinking into shadow ; 
learning setting over Greece to rise upon Italy ; and 
dying at Rome to be rekindled at Bagdad : — these 
are visions to dazzle the eyes, and people the fancy 
of a poet. 

It may be questioned whether the modern seve- 
rity of research be as profitable as it is ingenious. 
Thucydides no longer weeps at the recitation of 
Herodotus. Legends of beauty continually disappear, 
and the rents in history become plainer as the ivy is j 
torn away. Some eyes look sorrowfully upon this 
reformation. In the exquisite image of Landor, it is 
like breaking off a crystal from the vault of a twi- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. II3 

light cavern, out of mere curiosity to see where the 
! accretion ends and the rock begins. 

The historian has one advantage over the poet. 

j He is not obliged to look abroad for shining illustra- 

j tions, or corresponding scenes of action. His images 

j are ready ; his field of combat is enclosed. He 

! wants only so much vivacity as will supply colour 

and life to the description. Read the meeting of 

j Cyrus and Artaxerxes in Xenophon. A white cloud 

: spots the horizon ; presently it grows bigger, and is 

discovered to be the dust raised by an enormous 

I army. As the cloud advances, its lower edge of 

mist is seen to glitter in the sun ; spear, and helm, 

and shield, shoot forth and vanish, and soon the 

ranks of horse and foot, with the armed chariots, 

grow distinctly visible. This is the splendour of the 

epic ; it is Homer in prose. 

In a different manner, take Drinkwater's descrip- 
tion of the burning of the Spanish batteries at the 
siege of Gibraltar. The flames spread ; a column 
of fire, rolling from the works, lights up the soldiers 
and every surrounding object ; ship after ship is 
caught in the conflagration ; the sea is dyed in a 
red blaze, and through the canopy of smoke the 
English artillery hurl terrible missiles. Tacitus, 
whom Warton calls a great poet, might furnish 
many dark scenes ; as the sufferings of the Roman 
army under Caecina, the dying watch-fires, the trou- 
bled slumbers, and the spectre dabbled in gore. A 
volume of Livy is a portfolio of sketches. 

For an instance of the dramatic in modern history, 
the reader may go to Dalrymple. Dundee, wander- 

I 



114 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

ing about Lochabar with a few miserable followers, 
is roused by news of an English army in full march 
to the Pass of Killicranky. His hopes revive. He 
collects his scattered bands, and falls upon the enemy 
filing out of the stern gateway into the Highlands. 
In fourteen minutes infantry and cavalry are broken, 
Dundee, foremost in pursuit, as in attack, outstrips 
his people ; he stops, and waves his hand to quicken 
their speed ; while he is pointing eagerly to the 
Pass, a musket-ball pierces his armour. He rides 
from the field, but soon dropping from his horse, is 
laid under the shade of trees that stood near ; when 
he has recovered of the faintness, he desires his 
attendants to lift him up, and turning his eyes to the 
field of combat, inquires, " How things went ? I 
Being told that all is well, he replies with calm satis- 
faction, " Then I am well ! " and expires. 

Our poets have drawn splendid pictures of heroes 
falling in battle. Ben Jonson gives Catiline with 
the fierce hands still moving among the slain ; Burns i 
exhibits the warrior holding forth a bloody welcome' 
to death, and breathing his last sigh in a faint 
huzza ; and Scott surpassed both in Marmion waving 
his broken sword over his head, and shouting,; 
" Victory ! " But the closing scene of Dundee is" 
the most affecting. Every circumstance heightens 
the catastrophe. His bed is the wild heather, shut 1 
in by a mountain bastion, of which the gloom is. 
broken by frequent flashes of random guns. The' 
Pass stretches in dreary twilight before us. The 
sound is in our ears of a dark river, foaming among 
splintered rocks — ever tumbling down and losing. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 15 

itself in thick trees, while the eagle utters a lonely- 
scream over the carnage, and sails away into the 
rolling vapours. 

History, enjoying the pomp and circumstance of 

Poetry, is confined within narrower boundaries, and 

governed by stricter laws. Its portraits ought to 

be likenesses, so far as the writer's industry may 

acquaint him with the features of his characters. 

1 Peter the Great is always brutal on one side ; and 

I the senatorial dignity of Titian only allegorizes a 

' French Convention. 

Popular opinion allows more liberty to the pen 
and the pencil. It makes faithfulness subordinate to 
impression. Hannibal is never to be one-eyed, nor 
Marshal Ve'ndome hump-backed. The fame of a 
statesman must be written on his face, and the vic- 
tories of a general in his muscles. No lean hand 
may grasp the spear of Achilles. A Dutch Scipio 
shuffles off the Burgomaster, and strides into his 
frame in a toga. 

This view is encouraged by Reynolds, speaking 
the sentiment of an age when Garrick played Mac- 
beth in a court-dress, with bag- wig and sword ; 
and West astonished the world of Art by exhibiting 
the Death of Wolfe in all the simple grandeur of its 
truth. Reynolds, indeed, acknowledged his error 
in that half-hour which he spent before the finished 
i picture of the hero ; yet it may be conjectured that his 
j prejudice was rather modified than removed. His 
J theory of classical dignity in general would probably 
j remain as it was before ; and the ennobled presence 
of St. Paul in the Cartoon be still the object of his 



Il6 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

admiration. The Epical prince of Raffaelle may be 
nearer to nature than the vulgar mechanic of Bas- 
sano ; but the thoughtful eye looks for a middle 
form of expression, which shall be heroic, while it is 
real, and familiar, without being common. A 
painter is a historian writing with a pencil. But 
would Aquila and his wife have recognized their 
Hebrew brother — " in his bodily presence mean" — 
who abode with them, and wrought at Corinth ? or 
Lydia, the seller of purple, have known, by a 
glance, the stranger whom she met along the river- 
side at Philippi ? The moral of an exploit vanishes 
in the exaggeration of the doer. Surely that art 
is the truest which preserves and dignifies a defect. 
Let Agesilaus keep his hobble j and the Emperor's 
neck be awry in the marble. Show Falkland with 
an ungainly figure, and a rustic face brightened by' 
inward beauty. Are we to look for a hero whose ; 
nobility is of the soul, and to behold only the tallest 
grenadier of the column ? Why should Johnson's* 
eyes be alike upon canvas ? Is Milton to be cropped- 
in a frontispiece ? 

We have an example of this false history-painting- 
in the story of Nelson's coat at Trafalgar. He is^ 
reported to have silenced the affectionate importunity^ 
of his officers, entreating him to conceal the stars; 
on his breast, by saying, " In honour I gained 
them, and in honour I will die with them." This 
is the heroic stature of the Great Style. Tacitus' 
could not have put a finer sentiment into the mouth 
of Agricola. But its merit is simply imaginative 2 
Dr. Arnold heard the facts from Sir Thomas Hardy, 1 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. II7 

Nelson wore on the day of the battle the same coat 
which he had worn for weeks, having the Order of 
the Bath embroidered upon it ; and when his friend 
expressed some apprehension of the badge, he an- 
swered him that he was aware of the danger, but 
that it was " too late then to shift a coat." 

This circumstance suggests a caution not to look 
for great causes of great things. A pamphlet often 
unlocks an octavo. Nothing is too contemptible to 
make a political catastrophe. The Peace of Utrecht 
was a squabble of the bedchamber \ and we have the 
assurance of Burke that the war-cry of Walpole's 
enemies was only the hunger of Party breaking its 
chain. 

(2.) History is to be regarded in an educational 
light, as it opens new sources of information. A 
scholar may be six thousand years eld, and have 
learned brick-making under Pharaoh. Never lived 
such a citizen of the world ; he was Assyrian at 
Babylon, Lacedaemonian at Sparta, Roman at Rome, 
Egyptian at Alexandria. He has been by turns a 
traveller, a merchant, a man of letters, and a com- 
mander-in-chief ; presented at every court, he knew 
Daniel, and sauntered through the picture-gallery of 
Richelieu. Dryden called history a perspective 
^lass, carrying the mind to a vast distance, and 
taking in the remotest objects of antiquity. 

How many battles by sea and land the student 
has witnessed ! He clambered with the Greeks 
along the rocky shore of Pylus ; he heard the roar of 
falling houses when the Turks stormed Rhodes ; 
three times he was beaten back with Conde by that 



1 18 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

terrible Spanish infantry, which tossed off the French 
fire like foam from a cliff; he recognized Dante in 
the struggle of Campaldino ; stood by the side of 
Cervantes when an arquebus carried away his left 
hand ; and stooped with a misty lantern over the 
bleeding body of Moore. 

A cultivated reader of History is domesticated in 
all families ; he dines with Pericles, and sups with 
Titian. The Athenian fish-bell often invites him to 
the market to cheapen a noisy poulterer, or exchange 
compliments with a bakeress of inordinate fluency. 
A monk illuminating a Missal, and Caxton pulling 
his first Proof, are among the pleasant entries of his 
diary. He still stops his ears to the bellowing of 
Cleon ; and remembers, as of yesterday, the rhetori- 
cal frown of the old tapestry, and the scarlet drapery 
of Pitt. 

To study History is to study literature. The 
biography of a nation embraces all its works. No 
trifle is to be neglected. A mouldering medal is a 
letter of twenty centuries. Antiquities, which have 
been beautifully called History defaced, compose its 
fullest commentary. In these wrecks of many 
storms, which Time washes to the shore, the scholar 
looks patiently for treasure. The painting round a 
vase, the scribble on a wall, the wrath of a dema- 
gogue, the drollery of a farce, the point of an epi- 
gram — each possesses its own interest and value. 
A fossil court of law is dug out of an orator; 
and the Pompeii of Greece is discovered in the 
Comedies of Aristophanes. 

Lord Bacon denounced abridgments with eloquent 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. IIQ 

anger. But who can traverse all history ? When 
Johnson was asked by Boswell if he should read 
Du Halde's account of China, he said, " Why, yes, 
as one reads such books — that is to say, consult it." 
Of many large volumes the index is the best portion 
and the usefullest. A glance through the casement 
gives whatever knowledge of the interior is needful. 
An epitome is only a book shortened ; and, as a 
general rule, the worth increases as the size lessens. 
There is truth in Young's comparison of elaborate 
compilations to the iron money of Lycurgus, of 
which the weight was so enormous, and the value 
so trifling, that a yoke of oxen only drew five 
hundreds pound sterling. The lives of nations, as 
of individuals, concentrate their lustre and interest 
in a few passages. Certain episodes must be 
selected ; such as the ages of Pericles and Augus- 
tus, Elizabeth and Leo, Louis XIV. and Charles V. 
Sometimes a particular chapter embraces the won- 
ders of a century ; as the Feudal System, the dawn 
of Discovery, and the Printing Press. The frag- 
ments should be bound together by a connecting line 
of knowledge, however slender, encircling the whole 
fields of inquiries. The regal, the ecclesiastical, 
and the commercial elements are to be combined. 
The visitor must not spend his leisure in the Coli- 
seum, to the exclusion of St. Peter's; nor think 
himself familiar with London, unless he goes to the 
Exchange. 

(3.) The third aspect of History is the moral, as 
it cherishes the feelings of virtue, and enlarges their 
action. Southey felt confident that Clarendon, put 



120 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

into his youthful hands, would have preserved him 
from the political follies which he lived to regret and 
outgrow. Guicciardini, also, has some claim to his 
reputation of communicating high thoughts to his 
readers ; but the assertion that historians, in general, 
have been the true friends of virtue, will be rejected 
by all except the ciedulous, or the indifferent. 

We have only one national record of which the 
single design is to elevate and direct the mind. 
Jewish History is God's Illuminated Clock set in 
the dark steeple of Time. It is man's world which 
common narrative describes. Actions are weighed 
in man's scales. The magnitude of a deed deter- 
mines its character. Paul Jones is a pirate; Na- 
poleon is a conqueror. One assassination is a 
murder ; ten thousand deaths are glory. Yet it is 
supposable that, in the eyes of angels, a struggle 
down a dark lane and a battle of Leipsic differ in 
nothing but excess of wickedness. 

History is a moral teacher, however, in despite of 
its ministers. When Poussin gathered a handful of 
dust from the ground, and declared it to be ancient 
Rome, he was abridging philosophy in an epitaph. 
Tyre, burned by Alexander, and sacked by the 
Mamelukes, is a homily on fortune. 

" What does not Fate ? The tower that long had stood 
The crashing thunder and the warring winds, 
Shook by the sure but slow destroyer Time, 
Now hangs in doubtful ruin o'er its base, 
And flinty pyramids and walls of brass 
Descend. The Babylonian spires are sunk j 
Achaia, Rome, and Egypt, moulder down. 
Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, 
And tottering empires sink with their own weight." 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 121 

There is a sound of solemn sadness in the saying, 
that the glory of man is but as the flower of grass — 
a more perishable thing than the grass itself, more 
alluring to the eye, but exposed to fiercer enemies, 
and to the swifter ruin of the scythe. They are 
gone — the tyrants of ancient dynasties, with their 
splendour and cruelty — and have bequeathed to their 
successors the warning voice of the Prophet, 
" Where will ye leave your glory?" Think of the 
question having been asked of Sesostris, or Bel- 
shazzar ! But so it comes to pass. Their mag- 
nificence is taken off, like robes and crowns when a 
^coronation is over. The great Conqueror strikes 
his sword into life, and a gulf yawns between Caesar 
and his legions. The glory remains on this side of 
the chasm. The light of an empire dies out, like 
embers on a cottager's hearth. All the flashing 
shields of Persia, with the silver throne of Xerxes 
in the midst, could not cast one ray into the shadows. 
How is the king to summon his guard ? What 
bridge may swing across the darkness between 
Eternity and Time ? 

But History teaches another lesson from the 
grandeur of olden Monarchs, before the moth fretted 
their purple. It was not alone the crumpled rose- 
leaf that tortured their enervated senses. Fears, 
mysterious and spectral, continually rose up with 
menacing aspect. Oriental annals are funeral ser- 
mons. Southey has painted, with a truthful sub- 
limity, the feelings of Mahommedan sovereigns, — 
mourners in .magnificent festivals, wretched in the 
sunshine and smiles of Beauty, and ever listening, in 



122 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

the golden palace, for the Destroyer's trumpet at 
the gate. The apprehension haunted them in youth, 
and overwhelmed them with a horrible dread in age. 
A vision in the night, a strain of music, a strange 
face in needlework, startled them into tears. 
" Haroun al Raschid opened a volume of poems, 
and read, c Where are the kings, and where are the 
rest of the world ? They are gone the way which 
thou shalt go. O thou who choosest a perishable 
world, and callest him happy whom it glorifies, take 
what the world can give thee, but Death is at the 
end ! ' And at these words, he who had murdered 
Yahia and the Barmecides wept." 

Whatever chapter of History we may open, some 
text of alarm is certain to strike our eye. Europe 
shares the terrors of Asia. In the noble words of 
Raleigh, " Death, which hateth and destroyeth a 
man, is believed ; God, which hath made him and 
loves him, is always deferred." But Conscience, 
chilled by the stealing shadow, tosses on its bed. 
Charles the Fifth unclutches Navarre j and the re- 
membered blood of martyrs drops heavily — the 
warning of the storm — upon the pillow of Francis. 



XXI. — The Flowers of History — Biography. 

History is a great painter, with the world for can- 
vas, and life for a figure. It exhibits Man in his 
pride, and Nature in her magnificence : — Jerusalem 
bleeding under the Roman, or Lisbon vanishing in 
flame and earthquake. History must be splendid. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 123 

Bacon called it the pomp of business. Its march is 
in high places, and along the pinnacles and points of 
great affairs. The extent and brilliancy of the pic- 
ture render the execution difficult and unsatisfactory. 
The historian cannot isolate a hero, or a saint. The 
contagion of some infamous example infects his nar- 
rative. The impudent stare of a Castlemaine 
confronts a Barrow. Sir Thomas Browne had this 
inconvenience in his thoughts when he complained 
that History sets down things which ought never to 
have been done, or never to have been known, and 
suggested the advantage of choosing noble patterns 
from among different nations, Such a choice makes 
Biography — of which Fuller has sketched a happy 
outline, declaring its proper aim and task to con- 
sist in, (1) gaining some glory to God; (2) pre- 
serving the memory of the dead ; (3) holding forth 
examples to the living ; (4) and furnishing entertain- 
ment to the reader. 

The last quality gives to Biography the most 
attractive shape of instruction. The voyage and the 
journey of life are related with every variety of acci- 
dents, shipwrecks, and escapes. Biography is the 
home-aspect of History, as it gives the history of 
manners. It is Washington in his corn-fields at 
Mount Vernon ; or Pitt sowing the fragmentary 
opera-hat in the garden. " For my own part," is 
the confession of Dryden, referring to History, in 
which he included Biography, " who must confess 
it to my shame, that I never read anything but for 
pleasure, it has always been the most delightful en- 
tertainment of my life." The same passion was 



124 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

pleasantly manifested in the Danish poet, Oehlen- 
schlager, who, when a boy, and leading his father's 
choir at church, listened eagerly to the lessons of the 
day, but disappeared behind the organ at the first 
hint of the divided sermon. 

Plutarch, by the general consent of Criticism, is 
the representative of popular Biography. He has 
three of Fuller's distinctive notes very largely deve- 
loped ; nor, according to his measure of knowledge 
and light, is he wanting in the religious element. 
An ingenious rhymer of a former day asserts his 
claim to our admiration and regard : — 

" O blest B'ography ! thy charms of yore 
Historic Truth to strong affection bore ; 
And fostering Virtue gave thee, as thy dower, 
Of both thy parents the attractive power 
To win the heart, the wavering thought to fix, 
And fond delight with wise instruction mix. 
First of thy votaries, peerless and alone, 
Thy Plutarch shines, by moral beauty known; 
Enchanting Sage ! whose living lessons teach 
What heights of Virtue human efforts reach." 

Plutarch stands between the Historian, the Poet, 
and the Romancer, and catches the beautiful lights 
of all. His account of Theseus resembles a legend 
from an old chronicle, or a chapter of magic. He 
indicates his theory of composition at the beginning 
of " Alexander," where he observes that the virtues 
or the vices of men are not always seen best in their 
most distinguished, or notorious exploits ; but that 
oftentimes an indifferent action, a short saying, or a 
ready jest, opens more intricacies of the true charac- 
ter than a siege, or a battle. He supports his argu- 
ment by the practice of Painters, who bestow their 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 25 

chief labour on the face and eyes of the sitter, and 
run over other parts of the picture with a hastier 
brush. In like manner the Biographer, whose book 
is a portrait, is recommended to copy with diligence 
the features of the mind, and that changeful expres- 
sion which may be learned from its eyes. The 
detail and circumstances of a scholar's industry, or a 
politician's plot, he can touch in a broad outline, or 
leave to historical inquirers. 

Plutarch's Lives lecall Titian's portraits. He 
shows the face of a hero, or a philosopher, in the 
roughness, the glow, and the shadows of thought 
and motion. His individuality is never hard. He 
causes the representation of character to help the 
attainment of a general and striking effect. His 
memoirs are the Picturesque of Biography. Read- 
ing becomes sight as some vivid touch animates and 
fixes the scene. Caesar in the Senate house, sur- 
rounded by conspirators, and turning his face in 
every direction, meets only the gleam of steal. Pyr- 
rhus, wounded and faint, suddenly opens his eyes on 
Zopyrus, in the act of waving a sword over his neck, 
and darts at him so fierce a look, that he springs 
back in terror, and his hands tremble. On another 
occasion, the white charger of Sylla, lashed by a 
servant who saw his danger, carries the rider with a 
plunge between two falling spears. 

The slight circumstances of Plutarch are not mere 
anecdotes, inserted for the sake of amusement. They 
are traits of feeling and disposition ; short lines from 
a page of the heart put into italics. Homer is not 
more pleasantly natural. He tells us of his little girl, 



126 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

and her anxiety that her dolls might share in the at- 
tentions of the nurse. One stroke of the pen iden- 
tifies Agesilaus. Returning from the victory of 
Chaeronea, he makes no alteration in his furniture, 
or establishment, and wishes his daughter to be con- 
tented with her plain wooden carriage. We have 
all the wilfulness of Cleopatra epitomized when, to 
avoid discovery, she rolls herself in a carpet, and 
being carefully tied up at full length, is delivered in 
the dusk of the evening, like a large parcel, at the 
palace of Caesar. 

Occasionally he introduces little views of fields 
and gardens, which are extremely agreeable. When 
Lucullus, abandoning his Parthian expedition, 
marched in the middle of summer against Tigranes, 
and had gained the summit of Mount Taurus, he 
saw with wonder that the corn was still green. At 
a later season, his soldiers were wetted every day 
in the narrow woody roads, by snow that fell on 
them from the trees. 

The charm of Plutarch has allured many imita- 
tors. In modern times, Vasari breathed into the 
histories of painters and men of art the engaging 
simplicity and freshness of the Greek. We seem to 
listen to the Masters whom he describes, and find 
the exclamation of Lanzi upon our tongue : — It was 
thus that RafFaelle and Andrea taught their scholars, 
and the sharp, quick sentence flashed from the lips 
of Buonarotti. It is true that the reputation of 
Vasari has been built up by scholarly hands. He 
enjoyed the aid which Reynolds was accused of con- 
cealing, and had his Johnson in a Camalduline monk. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 27 

Hume wished Robertson to adopt this familiar 
kind of history, and make Plutarch his model for a 
series of modern lives. Avoiding disquisition, the 
characters of celebrated persons were to be illus- 
trated by domestic anecdotes, striking observations, 
and a general sketch of their employments. Hume 
also turned the eye of his friend upon the little 
groups of inferior actors, with faces more or less 
known, whom, in his happy phrase, we meet in 
the corners of history. 

The proposal was ingenious, as it showed the 
way to fill a gallery with portraits of discoverers, 
statesmen, painters, and men of letters. The annals 
of an age would be combined in a single view, while 
the reader, standing in the open field of universal 
history, and overlooking the barren places, might 
gather all the flowers, and make everything good 
and pleasant his own. 

The least interesting form of Biography is the Po- 
litical. A life of Walpole is a prolonged record of 
the wrangling of Party. Who cares for Harley, 
except as the friend of Pope ? The lives of soldiers 
are scarcely more satisfactory. The incidents are 
sorrows ; and only in rare cases, as in the British 
struggle with Napoleon, is the sympathy of the 
reader justly awakened. A thousand dreary chap- 
ters of ambition and blood must be waded over, be- 
fore the leaf opens upon Waterloo or Corunna. The 
sea is fruitfuller of instruction ; and Nelson and 
Collingwood supply manuals of patriotism and af- 
fection. The hardships of the sailor bring out 
another instance of Johnson's waywardness. Cook's 



128 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

voyages had just appeared, and pointing to them, he 
exclaimed, — " A man had better work his way be- 
fore the mast, than read these through. There 
can be no entertainment in such books." Yet a 
voyage, which is only a life upon water, seems to 
possess that variety of daring and escape which com- 
mon lives want. Its reality is romance. The suf- 
ferings of Anson live with the faery tale of child- 
hood, and the battered ship still drops to anchor 
with its ghastly crew, before the green and happy 
island. The story of La Perouse is a scene of 
tragedy that touches other hearts, besides that of the 
poet who said, — 



" His pages had a zest 
More sweet than fiction to my wondering breast, 
When, rapt in fancy, many a boyish day 
I tracked his wanderings o'er the watery way. 
He came not back — Conjecture's cheek grew pale, 
Year after year in no propitious gale, 
His lilied banner held its homeward way, 
And Science saddened at her Martyr's stay." 






Biography, exclusively serious, or devotional, 
contains many elements of beauty. The seques- 
tered teacher, the zealous missionary, and the 
glorified martyr, have characteristic features of 
sublimity and tenderness. How curious is our 
sensation in closing an account of Marlborough, or 
Richelieu, and taking up the gentle portraitures of 
"Walton. It is like being suddenly carried from the 
Thames, between London and Greenwich, rocking 
its stately ships, and lined by busy wharfs, into the 
pastoral Wye, with its green farms, and the solemn 
ruins of God's House. Compare a splendid saloon 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 120, 

in Paris with the holy scene in the old palace of 
Salisbury, where we behold — 

"The trusty staff that Jewel gave 
To youthful Hooker, in familiar style 
The gift exalting, and with playful smile." 

The Panegyric once spoken of a departed saint is 
true of every other ; and if an age be evil and de- 
serve him not, it is the more needful to have such 
lives preserved in memory, to instruct our piety, or 
upbraid our sins. And so, after the tree of Paradise 
has been cut down, the dead trunk may help to up- 
hold the falling temple, or kindle a fire upon the 
altar. 

The history of men of science has one peculiar 
advantage, as it shows the importance of little things 
in producing great results. Smeaton learned his 
principle of constructing a lighthouse, by noticing 
the trunk of a tree to be diminished from a curve to a 
cylinder. Rembrandt's marvellous system 01 splen- 
dour and shade was suggested by accidental gleams 
of light in his father's mill. White of Selborne, 
carrying about in his rides and walks a list or birds 
to be investigated ; and Newton, turning an old box 
into a water-clock, or the yard of a house into a sun- 
dial, are examples of those habits of patient observa- 
tion which scientific biography attractively recom- 
mends. 

But the annals of pure literature afford the highest 
gratification, whether the subject be a poet, a philo- 
sopher, or that refined inquirer after beauty and 
wisdom who passes under the universal name of 
scholar. It was the belief of Johnson that no lite- 

K 



130 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

rary life in England had been well written. The 
gorgeous tale of genius is always left half told. 
Time, which destroys its memorials, enlarges its 
lustre. It is only since biography and letters became 
convertible into gold, that the contemporaries of 
famous men preserve and publish the sayings of the 
departed. How we might have rejoiced if Occleve, 
instead of prefixing to a manuscript a portrait of 
Chaucer, had given a few recollections of the poet him- 
self, and fragments of his table-talk about the Pilgrim- 
age to Canterbury ; or if Ben Jonson, who survived 
Shakspere twenty-one years, had presented to the 
world a short review of his friend's festive evenings ! 
But the age made no sign when its noblest son 
passed away. The birth, the marriage, the author- 
ship, and the retirement of Shakspere compose his 
biography. If we seek for news of prejudices, in- 
firmities, charity, and love, it is found in his verses 
alone. Deep is the sigh of taste for lost treasures, 
whether it muses upon the sweet, serious conver- 
sation of Spenser, the gilded current of Hooker's 
sequestered thoughtfulness, the variegated wisdom 
of Milton, the magnificent explorings of Bacon, or 
the paradisiacal dreams of Taylor. Few footprints 
remain on the sand before the ever-flowing tide. 
Long ago it washed out Homer's. Curiosity follows 
him in vain. Greece and Asia perplex us with a 
rival Stratford-upon-Avon. The rank of Aristo- 
phanes is only conjectured from his gift to two poor 
players of Athens. Of every country and season the 
complaint is felt and uttered. Precious would be 
the journal by a Florentine De Foe of the indoor 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I3I 

occupations of Dante. Think of beholding, as in a 
clear glass, Macchiavelli living along the lines of his 
political web ; Galileo watching the moon plough 
her way across the clouds ; or Tasso, with Polybius 
in his hand, marshalling the knights of Godfrey. 

The most delightful life is that which a loving 
friend or admirer composes from his own recollec- 
tions. Boswell's Johnson is the model and the 
master-piece. In a humbler way, Roger North's 
account of the Lord-keeper Guildford and his two 
brothers is admirable for its dramatic truth and cha- 
racter. Of one of these, a Turkish merchant, who 
returned to England in the reign of Charles the 
Second, he has left a sketch so lively and particular, 
that we seem to have lived in the same house. We 
accompany him to Bridewell, and mark his trepida- 
tion at the turnkey with the gruff voice, who recalled 
the alarming "Chiaus" of Constantinople ; we hold 
our breath at his daring adventure in the tower of 
Bow Church, when he swung his corpulent body 
round the column ; or take his arm to St. Paul's, on 
Saturdays, when Sir Christopher Wren was there, 
to have " a snatch of discourse" about the building. 

The account of Wolsey by Cavendish has the 
same truthfulness and reality. It is a picture-book 
done by the pen. What a breathing, moving pano- 
rama is the Cardinal's day ! The tv/o " masses" 
being over, he comes from his chamber about e'ght 
of the clock, all in red, with an upper garment of 
taffety, or most commonly of fine crimson satin 
engrained ; his tippet of sables is round his neck, and 
in his hand he carries the mysterious orange, full of 



132 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

aromatic sponge, and anxiously held to the nose 
when the throng presses him, or a suitor grows trou- 
blesome. Not a feature of the procession is lost. 
We see the princely " hat" borne by a gentleman 
of worship " right solemnly," words which have a 
sound of the Vatican ; his mule with scarlet pillion 
and gilt stirrups ; his cross-bearers on great horses ; 
his train of noblemen and chivalry; and his four foot- 
men, bearing burnished pole-axes that catch the sun. 
And so the king's favourite rides to the door of 
Westminster Hall. No limner, in the monastic 
shade, hung more fondly over his illuminated saint, 
than the gentleman-usher of Wolsey upon the linea- 
ments of his Cardinal. 

Whether much or little be known, no secrets 
should be kept. Biography is useless which is hot 
true. The weaknesses of character must be pre- 
served, however insignificant or humbling. The 
jest-book of Tacitus, the medicated drinks of Bacon, 
the extempore rhymes of Cheselden, the preparatory 
violin of Bourdaloue, and the fancy-lighting damsons 
of Dryden, have their place and value. They are 
the errata of genius, and clear up the text. A 
French mathematician had pleasant doubts concern- 
ing the animal wants of Newton, and was disposed 
to regard him as an intellectual being, in whom the 
mind's flame had absorbed each grosser particle. It 
is a precipitous fall from dividing a ray of light, or 
writing Comus^ to weariness and dinner. But Bio- 
graphy admonishes pride, when it displays Salmasius, 
the champion of kings, shivering under the eye and 
scourge of his wife -, or bids us stand at the door of 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I33 

Milton's academy, and hear the scream and the 
ferule upstairs. It steals on the Poet and the Pre- 
mier in their undress : — Cowley in dressing-gown 
and slippers, and Cecil with his Treasurer's robe on 
the chair. 

The works of an author are not always evidence 
for the biographer, because talent has a professional 
temper which it manifests in type, or colours. 
Watteau was only gay in a landscape, and Young 
was cheerful without his pen. A delicate judgment 
distinguishes the natural from the artistic frame of 
thought. But in numberless instances the book or 
the picture is a commentary on the mind that pro- 
duced it, and corrects a false opinion of character 
and endowments. Walton imagined Hooker to have 
been simple and childlike in worldly affairs ; whereas 
the Polity shows an acute observer of mankind, and 
a vein of strong and quiet humour flowing through 
the learned argument. 

When a man relates his own life, we call it an 
Autobiography. These portraits may be captivating, 
but can seldom be trusted. The composer uncon- 
sciously, or by design, modifies and softens a harsh 
feature, or an unpleasing expression. His ideal of 
excellence answers the purpose of a painter's lay- 
figure. He disposes and dresses it in favourable 
lights and rich draperies. A deformed mind is 
muffled in cloth of gold. Such a person resembles 
Prior giving his picture to St. John's in a brocaded 
suit. A vice, or a bad custom, strongly marked and 
decided, is shaded off into a neutral tint. How 
amusing is Clarendon's vindication of his appetite, 



134 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

when, speaking in the third person, he says : — " He 
indulged his palate very much, and even took some 
delight in eating and drinking, but without any 
approach to luxury " In Brown's singular piece of 
mind-painting, the same self-delusion is conspicuous, 
and throws a doubtfulness over the whole. It is the 
physician's likeness drawn by himself, and presented 
to posterity. The mightier the writer, the more his 
tale will be suspected. It was hinted by Caesar's 
enemies that his Commentaries, which are a chapter 
of autobiography, would have been longer if he had 
inserted his defeats. 

Notwithstanding its defects, personal narrative is 
always entertaining. No style admits so many 
trifles ; moreover, autobiographers are generally on 
good terms with themselves, and amuse us, in spite 
of our contempt. To this class belongs Colley 
Cibber's Apology, which is the elaborate miniature 
of a Gossip. Cellini's mood is higher and darker. 
He opens his mind to the public gaze, and records 
with imperturbable tranquillity the symptoms of its 
disease and its health. We see him in every pos- 
ture of debasement ; abandoned and superstitious ; 
a scorner of the ignorant, and a believer in magic ; 
passing, by one step, from a brutal insult to a reli- 
gious sonnet, and fighting a duel with his eye upon 
Providence. 

The scholar's story is told by Huet, Bishop of 
Avranches. The order never had an abler repre- 
sentative. Of noble descent, he lost his parents in 
childhood, and fought his way to learning through all 
the ingenuity of persecution. His schoolfellows 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 35 

stole his books, tore his papers, or wetted them until 
the ink ran. During play-time they barred up his 
door ; to enjoy a quiet hour of study he rose with the 
sun, while his tormentors were asleep, or hid himself 
in the thick shade of the wood. But his efforts 
were unsuccessful. His companions hunted the 
student among the bushes, and drove him from his 
concealment. At length he became his own master, 
and the hill of knowledge and fame was rapidly 
climbed. From the age of twenty almost up to 
ninety years, he pursued his studies with a vigour 
that no labour could subdue. Languor was unknown 
to his iron nerves. After six or seven hours spent 
in mental toil, he cheerfully closed his books, 
singing to himself, and ready and eager for a new 
encounter. 

We owe these lighter touches of self-portraiture 
to the form of composition which Huet selected. A 
grave historian would have hesitated to relate the 
prodigies of fencing, jumping, and muscular strength, 
which he appears to have esteemed, as Johnson 
exulted in his " seat " after hounds. But as the 
individual record of perseverance and learning, the 
autobiography of Huet is invaluable. What age will 
behold another scholar to whom astronomy and 
Greek were equally easy ? who dissected with his 
own hand three hundred eyes, and edited the Delphin 
Classics ? 

Occasionally a true poet weaves into his verse 
the experiences and the delights of his early or later 
life. Few threads give more beauty to the web. 
The first canto of the Minstrel is an interesting ex- 



I36 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

ample, showing how the heart of Beattie throbs in 
the breast of Edwin j while the grassy turf, 

u With here and there a violet bestrown," 

the woody glen, the murmuring brook, the boughs 
rustled by the owl, the breezy down, and the misty 
hill clearing before the sun — are only so many re- 
flections of Lawrencekirk, and the lonely hamlet of 
Ferdoun. Collins resembles Beattie. Each ode is 
an episode of his own inner life displayed in colours. 
When the poet speaks without concealment in his 
own person, the biographical surprise is still more 
grateful. Cowper illustrates the reality, as Beattie 
shows the allegory. Who does not love his remem- 
bered walk, 

" Ankle-deep in moss and flowery thyme'*? 

or the confession of his impatience, in the winter 
evenings, to open the " folio of four pages," which 

"The herald of a noisy world, 
With spattered boots, strapped waist, and frozen locks, 
News from all nations lumbering at his back," 

had just dropped at the inn-door. And Akenside 
wrote few passages so tender and pleasing as the 
lines, in which he throws a backward glance o5 
pensive regret, upon the youthful hours he passed at 
Morpeth : — 

" O ye Northumbrian shades, which overlook 
The rocky pavement and the mossy fells 
Of* solitary Wensbeck's limpid stream, 
How gladly I recall your well-known seats, 
Beloved of old ; and that delightful time, 
When all alone, for many a summer's day, 
I wandered through your calm recesses, led 
In silence, by some powerful hand unseen." 

In our own day, the poetry of Wordsworth has car- 
ried the biographical style to its utmost boundary. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I37 

Sometimes Autobiography takes the earnest tone 
of Confessions, as in the penitential gloom of Augus- 
tine, and the melodrama of Rousseau. Frequently 
it flows into the short entries of the Journal ; Evelyn 
hears an admirable sermon by Pearson ; and Pepys 
sheds tears for a feather or a doublet. Letters are 
acknowledged memoirs of Self. Horace Walpole's 
correspondence inlays his own mind in mosaic. 
The epistolary style is always artificial. The open- 
ing of the heart to a friend is one of the fables of the 
golden age. Even Cowper had a tinge for his cousin. 
What a despiser of verses was Pope by the Post ! 
But the frozen housekeeper of Lord Oxford would 
have told a different story when, in one winter night 
of the terrible "Forty," she answered the impatient 
poet's fourth bell for a sheet of paper. 

From the lessons of Biography four may be 
chosen, (i.) It suggests a comparison between the 
difficulties of earlier and later readers : — 

"On shelf of deal, beside the cuckoo-clock, 
Of cottage-reading rests the chosen stock," 

which might have bewildered by its luxury a divine 
of 1300. The Greek sage had few aids. Plato de- 
voted three hundred pounds to the purchase of three 
books of a distinguished Pythagorean ; and Aristotle 
invested twice that sum in the small library of a de- 
ceased philosopher. Jerome nearly ruined himself 
to procure the works of Origen ; and Leo bartered 
five hundred pieces of gold for five books of Tacitus*. 
The biographer may moralise on the pen he holds. 
Petrarch being at Liege, in the earlier half of the 
fourteenth century, and anxious to copy two speeches 



I38 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

of Cicero, with difficulty obtained a few drops of 
ink as yellow as saffron. 

(2.) Biography cheers merit when its hopes are 
drooping, It leads the student down a gallery of 
portraits, and gives the comforting or warning 
history of each. It shows Jackson working on his 
father's shop-board, and cherishing a love for Art by 
a visit to Castle Howard ; Richardson, a printer's 
apprentice, stealing an hour from sleep to improve 
his mind, and scrupulously buying his own candle, 
that his master might not be defrauded ; or the 
Chinese scholar Morrison, labouring at his trade of 
a last and boot maker, and keeping his lamp from 
blowing out with a volume of Matthew Henry's 
Commentary. 

Occasionally one incident in the life of a re- 
markable person contains the most profitable instruc- 
tion. Prior, on the death of his father, was sent to 
Westminster School, which he left to assist his uncle, 
a vintner at Charing-cross. He remembered Busby, 
and made Horace the companion of his leisure. The 
Latin poet was to be the key of his fortunes. The 
Rummer Tavern was the Club of the Nobility, and 
numbered among its visitors the celebrated Lord 
Dorset, to whom Dryden addressed his Essay on 
dramatic poetry, and who, before he grew fat and 
nervous, was the gayest converser of that sparkling 
age. Upon one occasion he found the vintner's 
nephew reading Horace. A different version of the 
story is given, but with the same result. He ex- 
pressed his interest in the young man's welfare, and 
undertook the care of his education. Cambridge air 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 39 

ripened his powers. He rose to political renown, 
maintained at Versailles his reputation for wit, and 
returning to England drew from Swift the announce- 
ment, " Prior is come home from France for a few 
days ; Stocks rise at his coming" 

(3.) Biography turns our eyes from the present 
to the future. In life, Gorgias may be more ap- 
plauded than Plato, and Salieri snatch the reward 
from Mozart. Years bring the change and the re- 
compense. The statue follows the hemlock of 
Phocion ; and the chair of Boccaccio is raised over 
the ashes of Dante. A picture, for which Wilkie, 
in his early London life, received fifteen guineas, 
was recently sold for eight hundred. Biography is 
the application of History to the heart, and its chiefest 
fruit is patience. He who strives to make himself 
different from other men by much reading is justly 
said to gain this advantage, that in ill fortune he has 
something left of entertainment and comfort. 

(4.) The grandest lesson of Biography is the need 
of moral and religious principle. This is the burden 
of all its music. Stop for a moment before that 
youthful face, which shoots such a fitful and dazz- 
ling brightness from its proud, visionary eyes. It is 
the portrait of Chatterton. Begin with his childhood. 
At six years of age he did not know A \ he spent 
the same number of months in reaching P. Prior's 
plan of alluring the scholar with gingerbread letters, 
to be eaten as they are learned, might have failed. 
Suddenly a spark dropped on the cold mind. His 
mother tore up an old music-book for waste paper, 
and the painted capitals caught his eye. She said 



140 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

that he fell in love with the manuscript. A black- 
letter Bible completed the conquest of the dunce. 
He awoke like a giant, morning, noon, and evening, 
devouring books with unsatisfied hunger. 

His temptation grew with his intellect. A manu- 
facturer requested him to choose a device, or inscrip- 
tion, for a cup. " Paint me," answered the boy, 
"an angel with wings and a tiumpet, to trumpet my 
name over the world." It was Milton's daring 
without his prayer. The tempter of Chatterton 
was pride. One of his latest letters is still preserved, 
in which the terrible working of an ungoverned 
spirit is shown by the emphasis of his pen. " It is 
my Pride, my native, unconquerable pride, that 
plunges me into distraction. You must know that 
nineteen-twentieths of my composition is Pride. I 
must either live a slave, or a servant — to have no 
will of my own, no sentiments of my own, which I 
may freely declare as such — or Die." 

To feed this pride he robbed his neighbours. It 
is quite conceivable that a boy-genius, overflowing 
with mirthful strength, might banter a pompous 
pewterer by a Norman pedigree, or a dull topo- 
grapher with a castle in the clouds. But Chatter- ; 
ton's aim was money. His literary frauds were the \ 
rudimental efforts of a forger. The pride that | 
enslaved his soul at Bristol, drove him to London. 
Its bondage became fiercer. One after another his 
home-thoughts and recollections are whirled away, 
like spring blossoms in a hurricane. The black- 
letter Bible is lost in shadow. Mother, and sisters, 
the gifts of love, and the lights of ambition, disap- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 141 

pear. Only Pride remains. He retires to his dreary- 
chamber ; collects his fragments of verse and prose ; 
tears them in pieces ; mingles the poison ; swallows 
it, and plunges over the ghastly precipice in sullen, 
tempestuous, magnificent despair. 

O words to be written in gold ! — 

" Woe be to the youthful poet who sets out upon 
his pilgrimage to the Temple of Fame, with nothing 
but hope for his viaticum ! There is the Slough of 
Despond, and the Hill of Difficulty, and the Valley 
of the Shadow of Death upon the Way." 



' XXII. — Literature of the Pulpit — its 
Entertainment. 

When Beauclerk's books were sold, Wilkes ex- 
pressed his astonishment at finding so large a collec- 
tion of sermons in the library of a fashionable scholar. 
Johnson said, " Why, sir, you are to remember that 
sermons make a considerable branch of English 
literature." The caution might be widely spread. 
In every Christian land the learned mind has poured 
its choicest gifts into Theology. Chrysostom warms 
the fourth century like a sun. The discourses of 
St. Bernard are shining lights in dark ages. Dante^ 
whom he preceded by more than a hundred years, 
caught no views of Paradise from the mountain-top 
so fruitful and serene. If we turn our eyes to 
France, Bossuet is her grandest poet, and Pascal 
eclipses Montesquieu. 
The gloomy recess of an ecclesiastical library is 



142 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

like a harbour, into which a far-travelling Curiosity 
has sailed with its freight, and cast anchor. The 
ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise. 
Odours of distant countries and times steal from the 
red leaves, the swelling ridges of vellum, and the 
titles in tarnished gold. Davenant's description of 
their covers sprinkled with dust, and long streets of 
spiders' webs, is striking as the lesson it gives is 
significant. 

These are the controversies and the speculations of 
the schoolmen, and would scarcely be found on the 
shelves of Beauclerk. But the elder rhetoric, which 
had taken the shape of exhortation, abounds in 
elements of interest and materials of deep or elegant 
thinking, which the polite reader may separate from 
the text. Each volume is a common-place book of 
brilliant sayings and erudite allusions; a treasure- 
house of products and antiquities from every climate 
and age of intellect. Here are gathered, without 
much attempt at order or classification, battered 
armour of Homeric chiefs, dry chips of Seneca, 
poisoned arrows of Juvenal, magical flutes of 
Apuleius, grotesque words coined by that great 
minter, Tertullian, and spiritual clothing of wrought 
gold from Chrysostom. He who seeks for amuse- 
ment can find it. The slightest circumstances of 
ancient and modern life are preserved ; — from the 
vermilion cord with which the public officer 
pursued and marked the Athenians who neglected 
the Assemblies, to the first appearance of the 
umbrella in London. 

The preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I43 

centuries are its familiar historians. Latimer opens 
the royal kitchen. Andrews leads common life into 
the sun. We learn from Donne how street-begging 
had become a trade in 1625. Parents educated 
their children in it, and expert professors of the art 
received apprentices, whom they perfected in making 
a face and a story. Perhaps the English preacher 
caught this habit of sketching manners from Chrysos- 
tom 5 in whose Homilies we obtain so many lively 
views of Constantinople and Antioch ; who, in 
enforcing the study of the Scriptures, dissuades 
parents from hanging the Gospels round the neck of 
a child, or near the bed, as a charm ; and condemns 
the rich for using dice every day, and keeping their 
sumptuous Bibles shut up in the cases. 

During two hundred years, the sermon shaped 
and nourished the English mind. Greek and Latin 
fountains of philosophy and grace flowed into Poetry 
from the Pulpit. Shakspere might have picked up 
crumbs of Plato and Euripides from the orator of 
Paul's Cross. The preacher had a religious and an 
instructive character. He entertained that he might 
improve the hearer. He unfolded the grandeur of a 
Prophecy, or the comfort of an Epistle, and alarmed 
the conscience, or bound up a wounded heart ; he 
brought tidings of foreign learning to the scholar, of 
discoveries to the naturalist, and of manners to the 
people ; and thus he won the ears of the thoughtful, 
the inquisitive, and the idle. 

The sermon reflected the research, the feelings, 
and the experience of the speaker. The reading of 
a week slipped into a parenthesis. If Donne sets 



144 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

forth the praises of devout women in the morning 
of Christianity, he remembers a Venetian story 
about the matrons who were sent to propitiate an 
empress. In showing that sin separates a man from 
God, he tells the congregation of his own visit to 
Aix-la-Chapelle for the sake of the Baths, and how 
the house he lodged in — big enough for a small 
parish — was occupied by swarms of Anabaptists, 
who agreed in nothing but keeping apart from one 
another ; the father excommunicating the son on the 
third floor, and the uncle his nephew in the attic. 

Amusement is only the accident of our early elo- 
quence. In devotion, learning, argument, and ima- 
gination, it is unequalled. It comes warm from the 
Bible. The irradiated mind shoots a glory into the 
commonest word, and Christian duties are drawn 
with so much patience of love and embellishment, 
that later pens seem to produce faint and imperfect 
copies. Mr. Keble illustrates one of his poems by 
a passage from Miller's Bampton Lectures ; but it 
will be seen that the comparison had been employed 
two centuries before by Donne, and at a later period 
by Seed. Its last appearance is in a discourse of 
Mr. Melvill: — 

THE EYE OF THE PORTRAIT. 



MlLlER. 

" The point worthy of obser- 
vation is, to note how a book of 
the description and compass which 
we have represented Scripture to 
be, possesses this versatility of 
power : this eye, like that of a 
portrait, uniformly fixed upon us, 
turn where we will." 



Donne. 
"Be, therefore, no stranger to 
this face j see Him here that you 
may know Him, and He you 
there 5 and then, as a picture looks 
upon him who looks upon it, God, 
upon whom thou keepest thine 
eye, will keep his eye upon thee." 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 



145 



Seed. 
" When the discourse is di- 
rected to us, lending a favourable 
attention, and making pertinent 
replies ; like a fine picture which 
seems to fix an eye upon, and 
direct its views to each person in 
the room, who looks upon it, and 
eyes it attentively." 



Melvill. 

" Such is your nature that, 
without constant vigilance, the di- 
rection may be gradually changed, 
and yet appear to you the same, 
even as the eyes of a well-drawn 
portrait follow you as -you move, 
and so might persuade you that 
you had not moved at all." 



• The thought, indeed, may be found in a lightre 
page. When Colonel Everard revisited the parlour 
in Woodstock Lodge, where the old portrait of 
Victor Lee was suspended, " He remembered how 
. . . when left alone in the apartment, the search- 
ing eye of the old warrior seemed always bent upon 
bis, in whatever part of the room he placed himself." 

Read one more example from a preacher of the 
Elizabethan age, and of the present : — ■ 

OLD CHURCHES. 



Henry Smith. 
" This is our life, while we 
enjoy it; we lose it like the sun, 
which flies swifter than arrow, 
and yet no man perceives that it 
moves. He which lasted 900 
years could not hold out one hour 
longer ; and what is he now more 
than a child that lived but a year? 
Where are they which founded 
this goodly city? which possessed 
these fair houses, and walked in 
these pleasant fields 3 which en- 
tered these stately temples ; which 
kneeled in these seats ; which 
preached out of this place but 
thirty years ago ? Is not earth 
turned to earth, and shall not our 
sun set like theirs when the night 



Bradley. 
" Even the works of our own 
hands remain much longer than 
we. The pyramids of Egypt have 
defied the attacks of 3000 years, 
while their builders sank, perhaps, 
under the burden of fourscore. 
Our houses stand long after their 
transient proprietors are gone, and 
their names forgotten. Where is 
now the head that planned, and 
the hand which built this house 
of God ? They were all reduced 
to ashes 500 years ago. The very 
seats we sit on have borne genera- 
tions before they bore us, and will 
probably bear many after us. The 
remains of those who once occu- 
pied the places we now fill are 
underneath our feet." 



It is not intended to accuse the moderns of wilfully 
defrauding the ancients. The resemblances may be 



I46 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

unintentional. The object of the parallel is to urge 
the diligent study of our ancestors in divinity. The 
antique legend, which gave the sweetest song to 
nightingales that built their nests near the tomb of 
Orpheus, may have a moral for prose. 

The elaborateness of the early style was not felt 
to be wearisome. Hearers and readers in 1600 were 
seldom in a hurry. But now and then rambling 
through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, or of the 
first and second Charles, we overtake a loitering 
expounder, who has a large gift of tediousness, and 
might have assisted the German professor in his 
course of lectures upon the first chapter of Isaiah, 
which extended over twenty years, and was left un- 
finished. In the true Masters of theological rhetoric, 
however, the wandering and scattered utterance had, 
generally, intention and method. They spread out 
their thoughts and images, as a skilful general invests 
a strong fortress with troops j and threw reasoning 
into a circle, to besiege a hostile argument and cut 
off escape. Milton's definition is realized. The 
words in " well-ordered files fall aptly into their 
places." Similes and metaphors are rarely orna- 
mental figures, mere combatants on a rhetorical 
parade, with music and standards for show. They 
carry weapons, and are ready for action. 

The epoch of elegance had not arrived, and the 
eye of taste discovers many violations of its laws ; 
but the most objectionable fault is the mixture of 
spiritual and worldly things ; as in continental cities 
a shop is encrusted on a cathedral. South is a 
notable offender. He writes a political note on a 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I47 

Gospel, and couples Cromwell and Peter in a sen- 
tence. Much of this familiarity may be traced to the 
Miracle-play, which had left a popular impression 
behind it. Statesmen and Prelates were scarcely 
alive to the discord : in the first edition of the 
Bishops' Bible the portrait of Leicester was prefixed 
to Joshua; and, in 1574, the arms of the Primate 
Parker replaced Burleigh as a decoration of the 
Psalms. 

In whatever light we examine it, the sermon of 
the seventeenth century continues to be a problem 
of literature. It flourished in ignorance and withered 
under education. The " plain" manner came in 
with the National school. Day by day, the jewels of 
the Breastplate were more clouded, and the superb 
scenery of Truth was buried deeper in snow. The 
public mind has taken the tone of its teachers. 
Sublimity is darkness, and the glow of the Prophet 
is a poetical turn. Imagine Donne re-appearing in 
the Chapel of Lincoln's Inn with one of the dis- 
courses which he delivered to the Society of 16 18. 
Let him exhibit, in all its fulness, that manifold style 
which was the delight of his friends and of the 
crowd -, — the imperial logic, the gorgeous perspec- 
tive of imagery, the poem in a word, the melting 
pathos, the rapturous piety, and the splendour of 
language that flowed over the argument and adorned 
it, iike a crimson mantle upon armour. Picture the 
uneasy rustle of the Benchers, and the bewilderment 
of the Verger. 

Why should "sleep" and "sermon" be longer 
accepted as synonymes by the vulgar? A judge and 



I48 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

a master recommended Demosthenes to the village 
preacher. Surely, any style is better than that which 
is plain in the complete absence of expression, and 
simple in having no thoughts to convey. Is it 
surprising if the dead masses slumber under such 
appeals ? The fervour of the old eloquence is 
needed to strike heat into the sinner. His cure is to 
be wrought by no servile hand. Gehazi might have 
laid Elisha's staff for ever upon the Shunammite's 
child. The eyes open only to the Prophet's call. 
The kindled lips of inspired Genius must breathe 
over the benumbed soul before the colour of health 
will return, the baptismal flame be fanned into 
warmth, and the son of the Church be delivered to 
his Mother. 



XXIII. — Philosophy and its Delights. 

It was a remark of Bacon, that knowledge resembles 
a tree which runs straight for some time, and then 
parts itself into branches. Of these, Philosophy is 
one of the most verdurous, and throws the broadest 
shadow ; whether we regard it in relation to spiritual 
truth, and call it Divine, or to the phenomena of 
the visible world, and distinguish it as Natural, or 
to the feelings and powers of Men, and show its re- 
stricted application by the title of Human, or Moral. 
Philosophy comes into this Discourse under its 
single aspect of lighting and adorning* the thoughts. 
It is only Wisdom, with the girdle of Beauty, that 
belongs to our subject. Speculative theories are 
left in their barren splendour. Ingenious researches, 



ADVANTAGES^ OF LITERATURE. I49 

which obtain the name of Metaphysical, offer few 
lasting rewards. Exploring expeditions into the 
mind generally bring back fabulous news of the in- 
terior. The perplexed journey is made by twilight, 
and the dim impressions of the traveller become ob- 
scurer in their transmission. He seldom sees an 
object with sufficient distinctness to describe it. 
The question remains undetermined, if Ideas be 
inborn, as one observer affirms, or fragments of 
broken sensations, as another supposes, or fine chains 
coiled up in the brain, as they appeared to the inquisi- 
tive eye of a third. 

The student, therefore, who is enamoured- of the 
graces of learning, turns to authors who entertain 
his eye and feed his fancy with the loveliest pictures 
and the richest fruit. For this reason he is never 
weary of reading particular passages in Plato ; such 
as the allegory which compares the soul to a chariot 
with winged horses and a driver, and resolves its 
purest thoughts into remembrances of a brighter life 
in a nobler society. He learns a solemn and almost 
a Christian moral from the suggestion, that the soul 
of the philosopher will recover its lost grandeur 
the sooner, because, in a fallen and dark condition, it 
ever tries to recollect the things which higher In- 
telligences contemplate. An understanding, thus 
taught and illuminated, finds its eyesight cleared and 
strengthened. The earth on which it dwells is 
known to be Eden under a mist ; in the common 
flower of the hedge, in the painted clouds, and in the 
sunshine upon grass, it reads intimations of a better 
country, — 



150 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

tl Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there 
In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams, 
An ampler ether, a diviner air, 

And fields invested with purpureal gleams." 

Such a student is greatly charmed by the manner in 
which wisdom is communicated. Gilpin compared 
a true philosophical style to light from a north 
window, strong but clear. The colourless depth of 
the Greek has the transparent freshness, without 
being cold ; often a ray of exquisite imagination 
seems to dart through it, and leave a lustre and 
warmth. To the latest hour of his life, Plato 
polished and adjusted his illustrations and argument ; 
in the significant commentary of an early critic, 
combing and curling, and weaving and unweaving 
his writings after a variety of fashions. 

Our own literature contains many lofty and serious 
views of the mysteries of man's nature. In these 
the student may 

" At intervals descry 
Gleams of the glory, streaks of flowing light, 
Openings of heaven." 

Cudworth may be studied with pleasure and profit 
for the frequent majesty of his sentiments ; Henry 
More, for the wild strains of a tender and musical 
fancy ; Norris, for a serious Platonism, brightened 
by a heavenlier sunshine ; and Berkeley, for un- 
equalled grace and harmony of manner. The sys- 
tem of Wollaston is fearfully mutilated on one side, 
but his moral dignity and deep sense of immortality 
lend impression to his teaching. It is unnecessary 
to speak of Butler, who, in the walk which he chose, 
is as incomparable as Hooker. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 151 

Philosophical studies are beset by one peril, — a 
person easily brings himself to think that he thinks ; 
and a smattering of science encourages conceit. He 
is above his companions. A hieroglyphic is a spell. 
The Gnostic dogma is Cuneiform writing to the 
million. Moreover, the vain man is generally a 
doubter. It is a Newton who sees himself in a 
child on the seashore, and his discoveries in the 
coloured shells. A little knowledge leads a mind 
from God. Unripe thinkers use their learning to 
authenticate their doubts ; while unbelief has its 
own dogma*, more peremptory than the inquisitor's. 
Patient meditation brings the scholar back to 
humbleness. He learns that the grandest truths ap- 
pear slowly. They are like the shapes of cloudy 
light, floating in the uttermost loneliness of space; 
some the naked eye discerns, others a common glass 
brings into view. But it was the enormous Reflec- 
tor of modern skill, in the purity of a Southern at- 
mosphere, that gave to those masses of vapour a 
form and a look of glory, and kindled strips of mist 
into rays of exquisite lustre. Thus, the cloud of 
the weak becomes the star-cluster of the strength- 
ened sight. Many radiant bodies yet remain in their 
majestic retirements. No glass, however endowed 
with vision, compels these shadows to come within 
its range, and to show their faces. Still there is 
hope. The discovery of one star is the promise ot 
another. The hand of Science grows more cunning 
every day, and its eye endures a stronger blaze. 
This is the lesson for the inquirer into the far-ofF 
and dim things of Truth. Hour by hour some eyes 



152 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

are opened more and more by the Father of Lights, 
to behold the wondrous things of His Law. 
Nothing is too remote or misty for the straining 
and waiting gaze. The awfullest mysteries seem 
to be drawn nearer, and to glimmer from behind the 
veil. 



XXIV. — The Study of Languages. 

Fleury, after excepting Latin, Italian, and Spanish, 
for general readers, and Greek and Hebrew for ec- 
clesiastics, includes foreign languages among the 
curiosities of literature. In English he found no 
advantage to compensate a learner for its difficulty. 
Selden puts the relative value of ancient and modern 
tongues with much archness, in comparing a person 
who quotes a Dutch, when a classical author might 
be used, to a guest leaving a party of scholars to so- 
licit a testimonial from the kitchen. 

The judgment of Fleury may fairlv be questioned, 
but his omission of Oriental languages will not be 
disapproved. These mines are worked at enormous 
cost, and the returns are small. If Johnson's pen- 
sion had come twenty years earlier, it would hardly 
have profited mankind in sending him, according to 
his wish, to Constantinople to learn Arabic. The 
rarity of such acquirements imparts a fictitious im- 
portance. We regard a person who speaks Chinese 
fluently, as we might look at a traveller accustomed 
to take his morning walk along the Great Wall. A 
shadow from the Pyramids falls over Champollion. 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 153 

Languages are voices of a nation's mind. The 
mountain Greek has no tone of the soft Ionic. The 
Anglo-Saxon casts abroad in its short, stern, and 
solemn words, the awfulness of the forests where it 
grew. Italian is the love-talk of the Roman with- 
out his armour. A most curious instance of a 
language shaped by climate is seen in the South Sea 
Islands ; and we are told that whole chapters of the 
New Testament in these languages contain no words 
ending with consonants, except the proper names of 
the original. 

Of course every new language is a new instru- 
ment of power. It was finely said by Bacon, that 
God has formed the mind of man like a mirror, 
capable of receiving the image of the whole world, 
the variety of things, and the changes of time. He, 
therefore, whose knowledge spreads into the amplest 
circle, possesses the largest glass. Each added ac- 
quirement is a shade melted from the surface. 
Every fresh dialect is a new picture brought under 
the eye. But no riches are without inconveniences. 
Reflections of various objects overrun and confuse 
one another. The men of many tongues corrupt 
the idioms of their own, by catching the accent 
of their companions. Dryden attributed most of 
Cowley's defects to his continental associations, and 
said that his losses at home over-balanced his gains 
from abroad. That hideous German-English, which 
infects our modern literature, may be thought to 
confirm the remark. 

Another apprehension rises. The time which 
is devoted to a foreign writer must obviously be 



154 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

taken from a native. Some sense of sacrifice is felt 
in abandoning the fallen angel of Milton, with his 
face of " princely counsel," — 

" Majestic though in ruins," 

for the demon of Tasso, and his long tail ; Shak- 
spere ought to be nearly got by heart, before a 
summer afternoon is spent with Alfieri; — and the 
theologian should enjoy very long days of study who 
leaves Farindon upon the shelf, to muse over Seg- 
neri. What glorious poetry and prose must Schlegel 
have neglected, while he read with lingering eyes all 
the forgotten verses of Boccaccio ! 

The first "duty of a reader is to study the learning 
and intellect of his own country. Our English 
granaries will feed a long life. Bacon magnified 
" letters, which, as ships, pass through the vast sea 
of Time," and spread the learning and lights of one 
age over another. And we may carry out his illus- 
tration in the noble boast of the poet Young, that 
Bacon himself, and Newton, and Shakspere, and 
Milton, have showed us how all the winds cannot 
blow a British ship further, than true Genius conveys 
British glory. These heroic names of Wisdom and 
Fancy go round the world, while every foreign rival 
strikes jts flag as they pass. 

Literature has pleasures like those of Travel. 
No landscape preserves its bloom and colour out of 
its own light and air. It looks languid and dusty in 
a description. It must be visited to be enjoyed. 
The remark is not inapplicable to authors. Cer- 
tainly no translation of a true poem can retain the 
beauty. It is a landscape transferred to the wood ; 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I55 

outline, and grouping, and features may be pre- 
served, but colour and life escape. By what process 
of skill can the copyist present, in their full splen- 
dour, the epithets of St. Paul, the silvery lights of 
Livy, or the picture-words of iEschylus ? The 
weather-stains of Dante disappear in the modern 
fabric. The bloom of Petrarch melts under the 
touch. The polish rubs off from Massillon and 
Racine, and the crowded thoughtfulness of Pascal is 
scattered. 

Another obstacle may be noticed to the success 
of the carefullest version, — a home-feeling generally 
injures the truth of a description. I am taught by 
the pencil-sketch or Twickenham, which Pope 
drew in the fly-leaf of his Homer. The trim grass- 
plot runs up to the door of Hector. The character 
of a poem and a history suffers from the same 
cause — the complexion and the garb are no longer 
national. Cato addresses the senate in a wig, and 
/Eneas, on the arm of Dryden, has the lounge of 
the Mall. 



XXV. — Domestic Interiors of Learning 
and Taste. 

The Persian poet Saadi framed a lesson in a plea- 
sant apologue. Two friends spent a summer day 
in a garden of roses; one contented himself with 
the colours and fragrance, the other gathered the 
choicest bloom, and carried it to his family. The 



I56 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

happy home-life of genius is the moral of the story. 
Of many sons of learning it might be written : — 

" Oh, bliss, when all in circle drawn 

About him, heart and ear were fed, 
To hear him, as he lay and read 
The Tuscan poets on the lawn." 

We overlook Richardson reading a chapter of a new 
novel to a select circle in his grotto ; and Sterne 
never wears so attractive an expression as by his 
own fireside, while his daughter makes a fair manu- 
script, and his wife is busy with her needle. " I 
am scribbling away," he tells a friend, "at my 
Tristram; these two volumes- are, I think, the best 
I shall write as long as I live. My Lydia helps to 
copy for me, and my wife knits and listens as I read 
her chapters." 

The poetic hearth of Weston, with the sofa and 
the warm curtains, and the adventures of the traveller 
by land or water, 

" By one made vocal 
For the amusement of the rest," 

recalls the visitor who put the rose-leaves in his 
bosom. Nor should we forget Milton inviting a 
friend to waste a sullen day by the fire, cheered 
by a 

" Neat repast 
Of Attic taste with wine, whence we may rise 
To hear the lute well touch'd, or artful voice 
Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air." 

We breathe the Persian's rose again in Titian's 
garden-suppers, when the soft voices and instru- 
ments of Venetian ladies sounded from a thousand 
gondolas, gliding past in the moonlight. 

A familiar letter of Pliny opens the domestic in- 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 57 

terior of a scholar seventeen hundred years ago. He 
was stirring with the dawn, and thinking gloom 
favourable to meditation, he had his chamber dark- 
ened. Such opposite tempers as Malebranche, 
Hobbes, Corneille, and Sidney, seem to have shared 
this partiality. The morning was Pliny's season of 
composition. Having arranged his subject, he called 
his secretary, who wrote from his dictation, A 
saunter on the terrace, or beneath a covered portico, 
and a short carriage-drive, heightened his enjoyment 
of a siesta; afterwards he took a longer walk, which 
he improved by repeating a Greek or Latin speech. 
Supper concluded the day with a book, music, or an 
interlude. 

We have a graceful example in a poet who bor- 
rowed Pliny's language. Petrarch lived in the rose- 
garden. His was the day of the true scholar, who 
found in Vaucluse a hermitage of fancy. Often he 
spent the hours from early morning in unbroken 
meditation, going forth to his work of taste until the 
evening. At other times his humour was rural, 
and he wandered among the leafy woods, while his 
shadow lengthened in the moonlight. Occasionally 
he gave himself up to waking visions by the water- 
side, to the tranquil idleness of fishing, or to the 
culture of his orchard. A dog was his watchful 
companion. It lay at his bedroom door, rousing him 
by a sharp rap of the paw when he overslept himself, 
and the day promised a cheerful excursion. The 
moment the poet appeared, his dog led the way to 
the familiar haunts, brisk with joy, and continually 
turning its eyes backward. The rugged fisherman 



I58 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

and his withered wife, who composed Petrarch's do- 
mestic establishment, would have received smajl 
satisfaction from the richest rose-leaves he gathered ; 
but to his own vivid sense of sweetness no odour 
was lost. And doubtless he had days of solitary 
happiness, when the Muse brought him presents, 
not less delightful, if less real, than the Homer which 
he received from the Byzantine ambassador, and 
placed in rapturous admiration by the side of Plato. 

It might be agreeable to look for versions of 
Saadi's apologue in the studio of the artist ; to ob- 
serve Rubens consecrating his daily occupations 
with a devotional temper, surrounded by the finest 
works of ancient genius, and nourishing his imagin- 
ation by passages from Livy, Virgil, and Plutarch, 
which an attendant read to him as he painted. But 
I turn to portraits more serious and interesting. 
Jewell rose at four o'clock to prayers, and attended 
the public service in the cathedral at six. The re- 
mainder of the morning he gave to study. At meal- 
time, a chapter having been read, he amused himself 
by listening to scholastic arguments between young 
scholars, whom he entertained at his table. Then 
his doors and ears were open to all causes. About 
nine in the evening he called his servants to an ac- 
count of the day, and admonished them accordingly : 
" From this examination to his study (how long it 
is uncertain, oftentimes after midnight), and so to 
bed j wherein, after some part of an author read to 
him by the gentleman of his bed-chamber, commend- 
ing himself to the protection of his Saviour, he took 
his rest." 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. I59 

Good Bishop Hall has furnished a sketch of his 
own studious life in a letter to Lord Denny. No 
trait is wanting to complete it. Like his famous 
contemporary, he was up in summer with the bird 
that first rises, and in winter often before the sound 
of any bell. His waking thoughts were given to Him 
who made the cloud for rest and the sunshine for 
toil. While his body was being clothed, he set in 
order the labours of the day, and entering his study 
besought a blessing for them upon his knees. His 
words are : — M Sometimes I put myself to school 
to one of those ancients whom the Church hath 
honoured with the name of Fathers ; sometimes to 
those later doctors, who want nothing but age to 
make them classical ; always to God's Book." The 
season of family devotion was now come, and, this 
duty heartily fulfilled, he returned to his private 
reading. One while, as he tells us, his eyes were 
busied, and then his hands, or contemplation took 
the burden from both ; textual divinity employed 
one hour, controversy another, history a third ; and 
in short intervals of pensive talk with his thoughts, 
he wound up the scattered threads of learned research 
for future use. Thus he wore out the calm morn- 
ing and afternoon, making music with changes. 

At length a monitor interrupted him. His weak 
body grew weary. Before and after meals he let 
himself loose from scholarship. Then company, 
discourse, and amusement, were welcome. These 
prepared him for a simple repast, from which he rose 
capable of more, though not desirous. No book 
followed his late trencher. The discoveries and 



l60 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

thoughts of the day were diligently recollected, with 
all the doings of hand and mouth since morning. As 
the night drew near he shut up his mind, comparing 
himself to a tradesman who takes in his wares, and 
closes his windows in the evening. He said that 
the student lives miserably who lies down, like a 
camel, under a full burden. And so, calling his 
family together, he ended the day with Gcd, and 
took his rest, and rose up again, for He sustained 
him. 

Our own century supplies a companion picture. 
The literary life of Southey was the rose-garden in 
the pleasantest reading of the allegory. He has re- 
corded the various occupations of the day, and seldom 
were more learned fancies and religious hopes 
collected into the space that comes 

" Between the lark's note and the nightingale's." 

Three pages of history — equal to five of a quarto — 
were his morning task after breakfast ; transcribing, 
copying for the press, biographical collections, or 
what else suited his humour, filled up the gaps of 
leisure until dinner-time. Then a different kind of 
toil relieved him. He read, wrote letters, saw the 
newspapers, indulged in a short slumber — for sleep, 
in his agreeable confession, agreed with his constitu- 
tion. Tea introduced poetry, and Thalaba or Ke- 
hema underwent new trials, or exhibited more won- 
derful magic. Supper wound up the chain of 
thought, to strike the hours of another day with the 
same regularity. And animating all his work is seen 
a happy, Christian spirit, ever bringing the future 
into the present, and sunning itself, by anticipation, 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. l6l 

in the lights of a brighter communion. Most touch- 
ing are his words : — " When I cease to be cheerful, 
it is only to become contemplative — to feel at times 
a wish that I was in that state of existence which 
passes not away ; and this always ends in a new im- 
pulse to proceed, that I may leave some durable 
monument and some efficient good behind me." 

Hitherto we have been gazing into the chamber 
of the scholar, and the dreamer of magnificent 
dreams ; but the cottage-window ought to show an 
interior of beauty after its kind. There is no reason 
why the brown hand of labour should not hold 
Thomson, as well as the sickle. Ornamental reading 
shelters and even strengthens the growth of what is 
merely useful. A corn-field never returns a poorer 
crop because a few wild-flowers bloom in the hedge. 
The refinement of the poor is the triumph of Chris- 
tian civilization. 

It is growing. And now along the village-street, 
or in the lone dwelling to which the green lane 
winds, we often see the pleasing picture realized. 
The lending library brings the good man's life, the 
traveller's danger, or the martyr's victory, to the 
winter hearth, and the garden-seat in summer. 
Sweeter sights than these cheer our eyes — 



" With due respect and joy 
I trace the matron at her loved employ; 
What time the striplings, wearied e'en with play, 
Part at the closing of the summer's day, 
And each by different path returns the well-known way. 
Then I behold her at her cottage-door, 
Frugal of light; her Bible laid before, 
When on her double duty she proceeds, 
Of time as frugal, knitting as she reads j 

M 



l62 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

Her idle neighbours, who approach to tell 
Some trifling tale, her serious looks compel 
To hear reluctant— while the lads who pass, 
In pure respect, walk silent on the grass." 

A story is told of a Roman who expended vast 
sums in purchasing a household of learned slaves. 
He wished to have the best poets and historians in 
living editions. One servant recited the whole of 
the Iliad; another chanted the Odes of Pindar. 
Every standard author had a representative. The 
free Press has replaced the bondman. Literature is 
no longer an heirloom, nor can an emperor mono- 
polize Horace. A small outlay obtains a choicer 
collection of verses than the ancient amateur en- 
joyed, and without the annoyances to which he was 
subject. He had no familiar book for a corner, nor 
any portable poet to be a companion in a field-walk^ 
or under a tree. Not even Nero could compress a 
slave into an Elzevir. Moreover, disappointments 
sometimes occurred. Perhaps the deputy " Pindar" 
was out of the way ; or a sudden indisposition of 
u Homer" interrupted Ulysses in the middle of an 
harangue, and left Hector stretching out his arms to 
the child. 



XXVI. — ACCOUNTABLENESS OF AUTHORS. 

Few objects are more impressive than a large library 
by moonlight. The deep stillness, the glimmering 
books, and the lighted shadows upon the floor, affect 
the mind with a strange solemnity — 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 63 

rt At the midnight hour, 
Slow through that studious gloom the pausing eye, 
Led by the glimmering taper, moves around 
The sacred volumes of the dead." 

The student puts his hand upon a volume, the 
legacy of a shining and depraved genius, with a 
mournful remembrance of the words once uttered in 
the high-priest's palace. In a very different sense 
the speech betrays the writer. The sneer, the in- 
sult, and the licence, are idioms of the dark kingdom. 
How contemporaries flattered and successors magnify 
the author ! His vices were weaknesses — the waste 
splendour of a full mind. The chisel has touched 
the stone into his image. His portraits hang in 
noble galleries ; engravings tempt the eye in shop- 
windows ; a thousand pages of panegyric build his 
epitaph. Presently the whole life and works of the 
departed man rise clearly before the musing eye, and 
the Hand that scared the Babylonian seems to flash 
along the shadowy wall, and the letters of fire to 
start forth — 

" By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be 
condemned." 

No homage to the false charity of the age, nor 
any fear of its blame, should benumb this instinct of 
sorrowful apprehension. I am not speaking of the 
sinfulness which Chaucer and Boccaccio bewailed, 
and Dryden at least acknowledged ; but of that 
wilful and consistent impiety of which Biography 
offers appalling illustrations. Hume, mocking 
Heaven upon his dying pillow, rushed headlong, 
with Lucian's ribaldry on his lips, into the dreadful 
presence of the Judge ; and eyes that weep at a 



164 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

tragedy have no tears of blood for the saddest ever 
beheld. 

Southey was disappointed in being refused admis- 
sion into Gibbon's garden. But what concern has 
a Christian with the chamber where Messalina 
wantoned, or the study in which Aretine blas- 
phemed ? Intellectual guilt is to be punished with 
severity proportioned to its turpitude and destruc- 
tiveness. A book is even more than the life trea- 
sured up which Milton considered it to be. It is the 
soul disengaged from matter. It is a fountain that 
flows for ever. What should be done to the man 
who lavished his fortune in naturalizing a fever, and 
organized a system of propagating the plague through 
the post-office ? The execration of the world would 
drive him into the wilderness. Yet it may well be 
thought that a man had better be defiled in his 
blood, than in his principles. 

It has been conjectured, by more than one grand 
and stern thinker, that a departed spirit may retain 
a living sympathy with the evil fame and influence 
of its earthly career, and receive intimations of the 
corrupting and enduring might of Genius in a suc- 
cession of direful shocks ; every quickening of the 
pulse and clouding of the faith by a voluptuous, 
or a sceptical book, darting a pang of intolerable 
agony into the author's heart. Under this affecting 
view of the accountableness of literature, we may 
look upon each betrayal to vice and unbelief as a 
dismal episode of spiritual torment ; upon each 
deathbed of crime, first taught and cherished by the 
ministry of the pen, as a sharper sting given to the 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 65 

worm ; and upon fathers and mothers' sighs over 
lost children, as so many gusts to freshen the flame 
and the anguish of the Middle State. 

An interesting record of a great writer, lately- 
withdrawn from this earth, has been recorded by a 
friend : — " The last time I saw Mr. Wordsworth, 
he was in deep domestic sorrow, and beginning to 
bend under the infirmities of old age. ' Whatever/ 
he said, ( the world may think of me or of my 
poetry is now of little consequence ; but one thing 
is a comfort of my old age, that none of my works, 
written since the days of my early youth, contains a 
line I should wish to blot out because it panders to 
the baser passions of our nature. This,' said he, 
' is a comfort tome; I can do no mischief by my 
works when I am gone.' " 

Books, of which the principles are diseased or 
deformed, must be kept on the shelf of the scholar, 
as the man of science preserves monsters in glasses. 
They belong to the study of the mind's morbid 
anatomy, and ought to be accurately labelled. Vol- 
taire will still be a wit, notwithstanding he is a 
scoffer; and we may admire the brilliant spots and 
eyes of the viper, if we acknowledge its venom and 
call it a reptile. 

But the truth must be spoken — and for such of- 
fendors what rebuke is too stern ? These are they 
whose activity of evil grows with their fame ; who, 
red all over with the blood of souls in life, do murder 
even in their graves. If the servant, who hid his 
talent in the ground, was driven from his Master's 
presence into misery, what reward may he look for 



l66 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

who puts out his treasure with the dark exchanger, 
and traffics in all the merchandise of sin ? That 
author alone fulfills his calling to whom, in some de- 
gree, a friend's panegyric of Addison may be applied 
— that his compositions are but a preface, published 
on earth, to that grander work of his death which is 
to be read in heaven. 

The accountableness of authors has been en- 
forced; but there is likewise a responsibility of 
readers. The deep reflection of Davenant admits 
of a larger application, — "The plays of children are 
punished ; the plays of men are excused under the 
title of business." Readers, whose life is one long 
task-work of idleness, may recollect that time is 
religious money, certain at a future period to be 
called in ; and that a sleepless Eye is keeping the 
account. The column of debt will show an alarm- 
ing balance, when the outrages of Eugene Sue, and 
the politer wickedness of the French lady who calls 
herself a man, are seen to have absorbed the hours, 
or even the leisure of a week. 

Feminine education is beyond the boundary of 
this Discourse. Yet surely the mission of Woman 
demands a higher teaching than modern instruction 
usually affords. It is an adjustment of mechanism 
rather than a shaping of mind. One might imagine 
that the ultimate aim and result of her creation were 
to be realised, in the pursuit of some flying composer 
of visionary swiftness ; in pasturing uncomfortable 
cows upon thirsty fields of red chalk; or exhibiting 
the Great Mogul scowling frightfully in worsted. 
In this respect the nineteenth century will gain little 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 167 

applause by a parallel with the sixteenth ; when the 
brightest eyes were familiar with Greek as now 
with Rossini ; and a Latin letter to Ascham about 
Plato was run off with the fluent grace of an invita- 
tion to a wedding. Some thinkers will perceive in 
those decorations of the mind a lasting fascination, 
not always found in later accomplishments, and con- 
sider them more likely to win unquiet hearts from 
wandering and turmoil — 

"To fireside happiness and hours of ease, 
Blest with that charm — the certainty to please." 



XXVII. — The cultivated Mind and the 

UNINFORMED. 

It was a happy thought to compare a mind, enriched 
by reading and reflection, to a room in which a 
person talks with a beautiful woman, among the 
balmy lights of a summer evening ; and to see the 
image of a mind, neglected and rude, in the same 
apartment, when the sun is set and the lovely 
occupant has gone away. The man of taste and 
learning recognizes himself in a figure. The cheer- 
ing presence of Beauty and the magical effects of 
colour are continually within him ; while Ignorance 
sits dark and lonely, till education opens its eyes to 
the flush of radiance, and unlocks its ears to the wise 
charming of the Charmer, — 

u The sweetest Lady of the time, 
Well worthy of the golden prime." 

The pleasure is within the reach of all true seekers. 
The common flower does not grow by the cottage- 



l68 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

door more joyfully in the sun and rain. Mirandula 
mentions a plant whose leaf, taking a strong hold of 
the earth, shoots up into flourishing branches. The 
fiction of the Italian seems to be an emblem of 
Knowledge. A winter evening thoughtfully em- 
ployed may be the leaf, that, striking its root down- 
ward and spreading upward, will be covered all over 
with boughs and fruit. A day opens into a week, 
a week blossoms into a month, until the persevering 
learner is embowered and refreshed by the foliage 
and the clusters of a year. Every fresh acquirement 
is another remedy against affliction and time. The 
sick soul possesses a holier hospital for its fever, or 
its wounds ; but Literature is often a portico, or 
outer chamber ; and Homer prepared a costly elixir, 
when he showed Minerva concealing the wrinkles 
of Ulysses. 

A good book has been likened to a well-chosen 
orchard tree, carefully tended. Its fruits are not of 
one season. Year by year it yields abundant pro- 
duce, and often of a richer hue and flavour. Blanco 
White, reading Tasso after thirty years of neglect, 
gives cheering testimony : — " If I open the treasures 
of Literature which nourished my mind in youth, I 
feel young again, and my mind seems to be trans- 
ported into the regions of love and beauty, which I 
can now better enjoy than during the fever of the 
passions." 

Perhaps the calmer industry of the matured taste 
helps it to find the hidden fragrance. Many flowers 
— gay and flaunting — the commonest insects may 
rifle ; but only the bee's tongue reaches the honey 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 1 69 

when it lies in a long tube. Moreover, the toil of 
the bee is always tranquil ; its hum ceases over the 
blossom. From numberless books the fluttering 
reader — idle and inconstant — bears away the bloom 
that only clings to the outer leaf; but Genius has 
its nectaries, delicate glands, and secresies of sweet- 
ness, — and upon these the thoughtful mind must 
settle in its labour, before the choice perfume of 
fancy and wisdom is drawn forth. 

The truest blessing of Literature is found in the 
inward light and peace which it bestows. Bentley 
advised his nephew never to read a book that he 
could not quote ; as if the thrush in the May leaves 
did not contradict the caution. The music of wis- 
dom is in the heart. 

And this sequestered spirit of meditative enjoy- 
ment is recognized in much of our early Fancy and 
Learning. D'Israeli indicates a certain alarm at the 
Printing Press. The publisher of England's Helicon 
pasted slips over the names of the contributors. 
Sidney wrote the Arcadia for the woods of Wilton. 
SackvihVs Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates 
was sent abroad unacknowledged. 

A sincere lover of Literature loves it for itself 
alone ; and it rewards his affection. He is sheltered 
as in a fortress. Whatever troubles and sorrows may 
besiege him outside, his well of water, his corn, and 
his wine, are safe within the walls. The world is 
shut out. Even in the tumult of great affairs he is 
undisturbed. Dr. Harvey, the discoverer of the cir- 
culation of the blood, had the two young princes 
entrusted to his care at the battle of Edgehill ; having 



170 PLEASURES, OBJECTS, AND 

withdrawn them to a short distance from the fight, 
he sat down under a hedge, and taking a book from 
his pocket, quietly perused it, until a ball from a gun 
grazed the ground close by, and obliged him to 
retire. 

An affecting instance of the tenderness and the 
compensations of Learning is furnished by the old 
age of Usher, when no spectacles could help his 
failing sight, and a book was dark except beneath the 
strongest light of the window. Hopeful and re- 
signed he continued his task, following the sun from 
room to room through the house he lived in, until 
the shadows of the trees disappeared from the grass, 
and the day was gone. How strange and delightful 
must have been his feelings, when the sunbeam fell 
brilliantly upon some half-remembered passage, and 
thought after thought shone out from the misty 
words, like the features of a familiar landscape in a 
clearing fog. 

Pleasant it would be for us, in our gloomier hours 
of time and sadness, if we might imitate that Indian 
bird which, enjoying the sunshine all the day, 
secures a faint reflection of it in the night, by stick- 
ing glow-worms over the walls of its nest. And 
something of this light is obtained from the books 
read in youth, to be remembered in age — 

" And summer's green all girded up in sheaves." 

Coleridge said that the scenes of his childhood were 
so deeply written on his mind, that when upon a 
still, shining day of summer he shut his eyes, the 
river Otter ran murmuring down the room, with the 



ADVANTAGES, OF LITERATURE. 171 

soft tints of its waters, the crossing plank, the willows 
on the margin, and the coloured sands of its bed. 
The lover of books has memories, also, not less sweet 
or dear. Having drunk of the pure springs of Intel- 
lect in his childhood, he will continue to quench his 
thirst from them in the heat, the burden, and the 
decline of the day. The corrupted streams of popu- 
lar entertainment flow by him unregarded. He lives 
among the society of an elder age. Tasteful Learn- 
ing he numbers with the chiefest blessings of his 
home ; when clasping the hand of Religion, it be- 
comes its Vassal and its Friend. By this union he 
obtains the watchfulness and the guidance of two 
companions, loving and beloved, who redouble his 
delights in health, bring flowers to his pillow in sick- 
ness, and shed the lustre and the peace of the Past 
and the Future over the blackness and the con- 
sternation of the Present. 



THE END. 



LONDON : 
CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
BREAD STREET HILL. 



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